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"[A] smart, deftly written Southwestern novel....Cummins dodges an amazing number of pitfalls in her first novel. Yellowcake manages to avoid being preachy, depressing, melodramatic, or sanctimonious about either the environment or its native American characters. It deserves a half-life at least as long as its eponymous element." Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
For her acclaimed collection of stories, Red Ant House, Joyce Carol Oates hailed Ann Cummins as a "master storyteller." The San Francisco Chronicle called her "startlingly original." Now, in her debut novel, Cummins stakes claim to rich new literary territory with a story of straddling cultures and cheating fate in the American Southwest. Yellowcake introduces us to two unforgettable families — one Navajo, one Anglo — some thirty years after the closing of the uranium mill near where they once made their collective home. When little Becky Atcitty shows up on the Mahoneys' doorstep all grown up, the past comes crashing in on Ryland and his lively brood. Becky, the daughter of one of the Navajo mill workers Ryland had supervised, is now involved in a group seeking damages for those harmed by the radioactive dust that contaminated their world. But Ryland wants no part of dredging up their past — or acknowledging his future. When his wife joins the cause, the messy, modern lives of this eclectic cast of characters collide once again, testing their mettle, stretching their faith, and reconnecting past and present in unexpected new ways.
Finely crafted, deeply felt, and bursting with heartache and hilarity, Yellowcake is a moving story of how everyday people sort their way through life, with all its hidden hazards.
Review:
"The plot of Ann Cummins' first novel, 'Yellowcake,' seems to suggest that we're in for a pretty shrill experience: Native Americans dying from chemical exposure at a shuttered uranium mine. Regardless of your politics, that looks like a beam of white guilt that will irradiate all subtlety. Discovering that Cummins delivers something far more nuanced is just one of many surprises in this rich and touching... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) story. Yellowcake is the powdery substance produced while milling uranium ore, but it's also a compromise between chocolate and vanilla cake. Both definitions show up in these pages, which suggests something about the novel's ability to span industrial and domestic concerns. Cummins grew up in Shiprock, N.M., where her father was a mill worker, and she demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the labor and the laborers — Navajo and Anglo — who toiled away in this dangerous business. The story opens decades after environmental warnings closed the uranium mine on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Ryland Mahoney, who was a manager when the mill shut down, is looking forward to his daughter's marriage in a few weeks, but he's being pulled back into the past. With every breath, the oxygen tank he drags along reminds him of the mining chemicals that may have compromised his lungs. And then there's the arrival of Becky Atcitty, the daughter of a Navajo worker who's dying of cancer. Becky wants him to help a group of ex-employees sue the government for compensation for their medical problems. But joining that crusade would involve admitting that he poisoned his friends and co-workers, that he poisoned himself, that he's dying. Why spoil the wedding festivities with all that, and besides, who's to say what was really responsible? 'Maybe it was the uranium exposure. Maybe it was something else, like cigarettes,' Ryland thinks. 'As far as I'm concerned, half the people creating a stir want compensation for getting old. We're not young. Things go wrong.' There's a dramatic showdown set up here, a la 'Erin Brockovich,' but Cummins never lets that take over the novel. While the workers' protest rumbles away in the background, she's far more interested in the small personal dramas among these characters — conflicts of life and death, love and disappointment, that no court could ever sort out. The central relationship is the long marriage between Ryland and his super-competent wife, who's trying to manage his illness without turning him into a child. There's nothing romantic about dying from lung failure, and Cummins portrays that struggle with clear-eyed realism, but she's also attentive to all the other moments of comedy and romance that keep right on flowing between two people in love. And she's particularly sensitive to the quandary of young Navajo men and women who hover in the cloudy atmosphere of assimilation, enjoying the benefits of modern life but still aware of the riches of their parents' traditions. Becky wants to help her dying father, but she's reminded again and again that she can't even speak his language. The medicine men her father consults can't supply the technical records she needs to pursue his case in court, but is it worth violating his faith to confirm her own beliefs? Watching her grandmother pray, 'she feels entirely foreign, out of place.' Many likable people move through this novel, but my favorite subplot involves Delmar, the 'crossbreed' son of Ryland's best friend. Recently released from prison for stealing cars, Delmar is trying to stay out of trouble, even as he thinks about 'what a bummer the straight and narrow is.' The humiliation of weekly drug tests and picking up after rich white folks would be enough to test anyone's resolve, but he just might have enough determination and humor to make it. The chapters that show him struggling to stay clean are marvels of insight and sympathy. Cummins, who teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University, published a well-received collection of short stories called 'Red Ant House' in 2003. In some ways, 'Yellowcake' is a collection of stories, too, but she's knit them together to reflect the messiness and continuity of real life, a marvelous blending of crises and blessings and a fair share of wondering and worrying. In the end, Cummins rather bravely leaves all her loose ends loose — none of that Anglo obsession with closure. That could have been frustrating, but here the effect is poignant. It leaves space that you can't help but fill with your own hopes for these tender, resilient people. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Marc LeepsonJames M. LindsayRon Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"[A] complex, unusually mature debut novel...interweaving the personal and political with quiet authority." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review:
"Cummins brilliantly conflates the insidious damage wrought by radiation sickness with the maladies of the soul caused by prejudice, poverty, nature's abuse, and love's betrayal." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"A tightly drawn and absorbing novel of the modern American Southwest." Library Journal
Review:
"Already much admired for her superb short stories, Ann Cummins excels once more with a first novel that places her among the most serious and original writers of her generation." Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and A Feather on the Breath of God
Review:
"Ann Cummins has one of the most original and addictive voices around. In Yellowcake she uses it to tell a story that's filled with suspense, humanity, and a deep concern for what we make of the world we live in. This novel achieves a rare combination: it's both important and beautiful." Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Review:
"A memorable journey behind the buried news article or fleeting sound bite. Cummins's characters inhabit this world with dignity, humor, and complexity, and her treatment of them does what great literature always does better than the evening news: it includes its readers in humanity's profound engagement with righting wrongs. There's no one I wouldn't recommend this book to." Antonya Nelson, author of Some Fun and Female Trouble
Review:
"Glorious...an unflinchingly honest look at the struggles faced by so-called ordinary Americans. But there is nothing at all ordinary about the wonderful, fully fleshed characters that populate this book. Cummins knows the souls of her people — an incredibly wide range of them — and she knows her place, a Southwest that is rendered in all its unromantic but somehow blessed beauty." Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Esther Stories
Review:
"Yellowcake is about those solid citizens — Navajo and white — whose work helped construct America's postwar prosperity and power, and whose repayment was exploitation and neglect. Ann Cummins is wonderful on the way individuals, just like corporations, seek to erase history; she's wonderful on the way our compassion works in counterpoint to our heedlessness." Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen
Review:
"A gorgeous novel about people who are as tender and ornery and passionate and mixed-up and real as the people we know in real life. I loved them, and I love this book." Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Synopsis:
For her acclaimed collection of stories, "Red Ant House," Joyce Carol Oates hailed Ann Cummins as "a master storyteller." Now, in her debut novel, Cummins stakes claim to rich new literary territory with a story of straddling cultures and cheating fate in the American Southwest.
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, Ann Cummins is the author of Red Ant House, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best Book of the Year. She has had her stories published in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Quarterly West, and the Sonora Review, among other publications, as well as The Best American Short Stories 2002. The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.
Product details
320 pages
Houghton Mifflin Company -
English9780618269266
Reviews:
"Review A Day"
by Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor,
"[A] smart, deftly written Southwestern novel....Cummins dodges an amazing number of pitfalls in her first novel. Yellowcake manages to avoid being preachy, depressing, melodramatic, or sanctimonious about either the environment or its native American characters. It deserves a half-life at least as long as its eponymous element." (read the entire CSM review)
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review),
"[A] complex, unusually mature debut novel...interweaving the personal and political with quiet authority."
"Review"
by Booklist (Starred Review),
"Cummins brilliantly conflates the insidious damage wrought by radiation sickness with the maladies of the soul caused by prejudice, poverty, nature's abuse, and love's betrayal."
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"A tightly drawn and absorbing novel of the modern American Southwest."
"Review"
by Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and A Feather on the Breath of God,
"Already much admired for her superb short stories, Ann Cummins excels once more with a first novel that places her among the most serious and original writers of her generation."
"Review"
by Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name,
"Ann Cummins has one of the most original and addictive voices around. In Yellowcake she uses it to tell a story that's filled with suspense, humanity, and a deep concern for what we make of the world we live in. This novel achieves a rare combination: it's both important and beautiful."
"Review"
by Antonya Nelson, author of Some Fun and Female Trouble,
"A memorable journey behind the buried news article or fleeting sound bite. Cummins's characters inhabit this world with dignity, humor, and complexity, and her treatment of them does what great literature always does better than the evening news: it includes its readers in humanity's profound engagement with righting wrongs. There's no one I wouldn't recommend this book to."
"Review"
by Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Esther Stories,
"Glorious...an unflinchingly honest look at the struggles faced by so-called ordinary Americans. But there is nothing at all ordinary about the wonderful, fully fleshed characters that populate this book. Cummins knows the souls of her people — an incredibly wide range of them — and she knows her place, a Southwest that is rendered in all its unromantic but somehow blessed beauty."
"Review"
by Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen,
"Yellowcake is about those solid citizens — Navajo and white — whose work helped construct America's postwar prosperity and power, and whose repayment was exploitation and neglect. Ann Cummins is wonderful on the way individuals, just like corporations, seek to erase history; she's wonderful on the way our compassion works in counterpoint to our heedlessness."
"Review"
by Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier,
"A gorgeous novel about people who are as tender and ornery and passionate and mixed-up and real as the people we know in real life. I loved them, and I love this book."
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
For her acclaimed collection of stories, "Red Ant House," Joyce Carol Oates hailed Ann Cummins as "a master storyteller." Now, in her debut novel, Cummins stakes claim to rich new literary territory with a story of straddling cultures and cheating fate in the American Southwest.
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