Answer to last week's Thread: Nancy Drew
Full disclosure: I’ll read anything Jeannette Walls writes - her memoirs, magazine stories, menus for dinner parties she’s throwing, I just love her voice.
So when her new novel landed in my hands, I tucked the book into my bag and opened it on a long flight to Europe.
When I next looked up, we were just a couple of hours from our destination.
Walls’ prose, whether in fiction or memoir, is deceptively straightforward. The story unfurls so effortlessly that you can miss the propulsive rhythm and stylish phrasing of her work.
In her new novel, “Hang the Moon,” we’re introduced to Sallie Kincaid, the daughter of a big boss in a rural Virginia county.
Duke Kincaid is so powerful he runs a half dozen businesses, determines who gets elected to what office and metes out his kind of justice, which might include forcing a marriage between a widow and the man who turned her into one.
Sallie is in his thrall until she is sent away at the bequest of Duke’s second wife. When she returns at age 17, she sees her father with more mature and objective eyes, even as she persuades him to hire her as his driver.
But Duke’s world is one of secrets and conflict and Sallie is quickly tested. Can she measure up to her family’s expectations and her own?
That’s a theme that Jeannette Walls has been interested in for most of her life.
After her bestselling memoir “The Glass Castle” and two historical novels, she told the New York Times that one of the themes she’s interested in is when it is smart to fight back.
“One of the blessings of my childhood was being a fighter and a scrapper, but being a fighter and a scrapper is a curse too,” she said.
That’s something Sallie will learn too, as she embarks on a daring plan to bootleg booze in the middle of Prohibition and to step into the legacy her powerful, flawed father left for her.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News
