I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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One of the best books I've read in years. It begins as a reverie of the untold life of Stella, a renowned opera singer, and quickly digresses into a period piece of life in rural West Virginia during the early part of the Great Depression as perceived through the eyes of a 7 year old country boy, Hughie, heir to the evolving Curtis Farm (the grown up Huston Curtis). Then the role of the protagonist shifts to the boy's mother, Billie Pearl, a natural born do-gooder. Don't fret, this is not a romance novel. Lots of sex and mayhem in just the first chapter. Murder and madness shortly ensue. Eventually Stella's story gets told... but so do many others.
Had Frank Capra and Huston Curtis teamed up 50 years ago, they could have collaborated to make perhaps 10 movies out of the episodes of the Curtis and Fancler clans, turning tragedy into comedy into tear wrenching redemption. And it even sounds true.
The running theme, sure to amuse, is the interplay between the constant scheming of the liberal minded Billie-Pearl, the most beautiful woman in the county, fiercely independent and out to save the world one neighbor at a time, and her seven and a half year old son, Hughie, the money motivated little capitalist, the political polar opposite, struggling to understand his mother's generosity during a time of economic uncertainty.
Although written in 2003, the book is much more topical in 2009 as an indicator of how much the country has changed, and how much it hasn't, since 1929.
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Sins of the Seventh Sister: A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South by Huston Curtiss
apollo559, February 27, 2009
One of the best books I've read in years. It begins as a reverie of the untold life of Stella, a renowned opera singer, and quickly digresses into a period piece of life in rural West Virginia during the early part of the Great Depression as perceived through the eyes of a 7 year old country boy, Hughie, heir to the evolving Curtis Farm (the grown up Huston Curtis). Then the role of the protagonist shifts to the boy's mother, Billie Pearl, a natural born do-gooder. Don't fret, this is not a romance novel. Lots of sex and mayhem in just the first chapter. Murder and madness shortly ensue. Eventually Stella's story gets told... but so do many others.Had Frank Capra and Huston Curtis teamed up 50 years ago, they could have collaborated to make perhaps 10 movies out of the episodes of the Curtis and Fancler clans, turning tragedy into comedy into tear wrenching redemption. And it even sounds true.
The running theme, sure to amuse, is the interplay between the constant scheming of the liberal minded Billie-Pearl, the most beautiful woman in the county, fiercely independent and out to save the world one neighbor at a time, and her seven and a half year old son, Hughie, the money motivated little capitalist, the political polar opposite, struggling to understand his mother's generosity during a time of economic uncertainty.
Although written in 2003, the book is much more topical in 2009 as an indicator of how much the country has changed, and how much it hasn't, since 1929.
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)