Synopses & Reviews
When Addy Shadd was a young girl living in Rusholme, she was taught the history of her town, which was settled by fugitive slaves in the 1800s. It was told to her like a storybook legend and although Addy is forced to leave her beloved home as a teenager, the place will call her for the rest of her life. She thinks of it as a commandment: "Rush home, Addy Shadd. Thou shalt rush home." But the stories and memories of Addy's past have been buried deep in her seventy-year-old heart memories that are by turns dark and poignant, erotic and mysterious.
When five-year-old Sharla Cody is abandoned on Addy's trailer-park doorstep, the old woman doesn't know if she is up to the task of mothering the willful, curious, child. But she takes the little girl into her home, and Sharla opens a door to Addy's past to memories of the strawberry fields, the church graveyard, and the tender crust of her Mama Laisa's apple pies. Addy remembers the bootleggers, and life in Detroit City, and the shocking encounter she witnessed in the shadows one unforgettable night. She remembers her childhood sweetheart Chester Monk, and the three-layered white cake decorated with candy rosebuds that she made for her little girl, Chick. The past returns to Addy Shadd, and as she sits in her trailer she can close her eyes and "see the country farms and city streets and recall each season of death and rebirth." Somehow, Sharla Cody helps Addy make sense of her long and hard life so she can find forgiveness and finally make the journey home again.
Review
"Certain novels recall fairy tales....[This] is just such a novel....[A]rtfully done....Some readers will resent the repeated plucking of their heartstrings....Nonetheless, Lansens has created in Addy a truly noble character, not for what she suffered in the past but for what she does in the novel's present." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A poignant novel about the power of love and forgiveness." Vanessa Bush, Booklist
Review
"Brimming over with good intentions, but a relentlessly churning plot makes for an unconvincing ride." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Though Addy has led a hard life, her beautiful, gentle spirit, her wise and loving way with Sharla, and an ultimate message of hope redeem the book from melancholy. A beautiful debut..." Library Journal
Review
"To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is to read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women coupled with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison....Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities." George Elliot Clarke, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Review
"While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country's long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens...does so passionately with Rush Home Road...a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and place and about humankind than when we opened the cover." Quill & Quire
Review
"Rush Home Road...is a first novel of exquisite power, honesty and conviction. Its [a] portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate and loss." Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and A Theory of Relativity
Review
"Rush Home Road is brilliant in its microscopic portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams, laughter and joy of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town. It draws with pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing 'Negro' societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations along the Underground Railway." Austin Clarke, author of The Question and The Origin of Waves
Synopsis
In the spirit of White Oleander and The Color Purple comes a heartbreaking and page-turning story about an 80-year-old woman who confronts and relives her life when a five-year-old girl is abandoned on her doorstep.
Synopsis
When 5-year old Sharla Cody is dumped on the doorstep of Addy Shadd, a 70-year old woman living in a trailer park, Addy does not know how completely her life is about to change. She's hardly used to company and the troubled Sharla is not the sweet, beautiful angel she had envisioned. Over time, Addy and Sharla form a bond that neither of them expected-and Sharla begins to undergo a transformation under Addy's patient and loving care. But much to Addy's surprise and dismay, Sharla's presence brings back memories of her own tumultuous childhood. As she reminisces about her days growing up in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves in the mid 1800s, she remembers her family and her first love and confronts the painful experience that drove her away from home, never to return.
Brilliantly structured and achingly lyrical, this beautiful first novel by the award-winning author of The Girls tells the story of two unlikely people thrown together who transform each other's lives forever.
About the Author
Lori Lansens has written several screenplays. This is her first novel. She lives in Toronto, Canada.