Wow! eBook
By Way of Water
Author(s): Charlotte Gullick (Author)
- Publisher: Blue Hen
- Publication Date: August 5, 2002
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 262 pages
- ISBN-10: 0399148981
- ISBN-13: 9780399148989
Book Description
Seeking to hold her California logging family together despite unemployment, her father's growing stubbornness and violence, and her mother's blind faith, seven-year-old Justy considers the stark realities of her world and dreams of a safer life. A first novel.
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
The deepest beliefs of a husband and wife come into conflict in this debut novel set in the late 1970s in a California forest threatened by the opening of a mine. When Jake Colby married Dale, pregnant at 17, they made music together, he with his fiddle and she with her splendid voice. But when Dale found salvation through the Jehovah's Witnesses, she stopped using her voice for pagan songs and stopped all celebrations. And when Pan-Native American Jake couldn't find logging work, his pride kept him from accepting assistance, government or otherwise, even when his children--Lacee, 14, Micah, 8, and Justy, 7--went hungry. After drinking, Jake becomes violent, and this behavior, which has fractured the family, finally results in tragedy. Having the narrative carried by Justy, who gives up speech and senses her parents' every move, strains credulity and is too much for a small girl to bear. Yet Gullick deftly touches on wider issues of environmentalism and racism, and her characters are well drawn. A heartfelt first novel. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Charlotte Gullick is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet who grew up in the rural timber country of northern California. This is her first novel.
