Wow! eBook
Haven's Wake
Author(s): Ladette Randolph (Author)
- Publisher: Bison Books
- Publication Date: 1 Mar. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 080324357X
- ISBN-13: 9780803243576
Book Description
Early July, and the corn in eastern Nebraska stands ten feet tall; after a near-decade of drought, it seems too good to be true, and everyone is watching the sky for trouble. For the Grebels, whose plots of organic crops trace a modest patchwork among the vast fields of soybeans and corn, trouble arrives from a different quarter in the form of Elsa’s voice on her estranged son’s answering machine: “Your father’s dead. You’ll probably want to come home.”
When a tractor accident fells the patriarch of this Mennonite family, the threads holding them together are suddenly drawn taut, singing with the tensions of a lifetime’s worth of love and faith, betrayal and shame. Through the competing voices of those gathered for Haven Grebel’s funeral, acts of loyalty and failures, long-suppressed resentments and a tragic secret are brought to light, expressing a larger, complex truth.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Ladette Randolph traces that finest of lines between what counts as betrayal and what counts as fidelity in a family, what counts as love and what counts as duty over the generations, what counts as desire and what counts as necessity in a home.
Haven’s Wake is a moving reckoning of disappointments and glories.”―William Lychack, author of The Architect of Flowers“A song of a story―uplifting, tender, heart-shattering. Ladette Randolph is a master. These characters are so real to me I feel I could drive to Nebraska and find them, easily.”―Debra Magpie Earling, author of
Perma Red“[
Haven’s Wake is] lyrically written and a wonderful read.”—Ellen Meeropol, ellenmeeropol.com“With prose that vivifies the intricate patchwork of characters and captures the landscape’s simplicity,
Haven’s Wake explores ‘the various attempts to explain the unexplainable,’ including family, faith, and death.”―Katharine Fronk, Booklist Online“Randolph is an excellent writer, telling the story with a frankness and humor that keeps it from sinking into melodrama.”—Publishers Weekly
