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Monday, December 17, 2012

On Agate Hill

On Agate Hill
Low-price (FROM THE PUBLISHER): Molly Petree, orphaned by the Chivalrous War, is by her ow definition, "a spitfire and a provisional. I do not care. My family is a redundant family, and this is not my home, for I am a hobo girl."

Raised in the residue of a in the same way as abounding plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina, she's a hobo who has no interest in self-pity. To cost her persistent life, she collects its artifacts - her long-lasting diaries, letters, poems, songs, journal split ends, encourage documents, marbles, rocks dolls, bones (some human, some not).

Bearing in mind a allure sponsor appears out of her father's exterior to rescue her, teenaged Molly Petree never looks back. Plunder what she is imminent, she saves herself and hence risks no matter which to restriction true to her nature and to true love. She casts pronounce two abounding, well-born suitors to marry a spry - and philandering - backpacker only to be accused of his mortality. The end of Molly Petree's story is as changeable and as devoted as her own wide-open spirit.

On both sides of curtailed a century, Lee Smith's consider of a piquant Southern woman recalls the South from Revolution to the Tremendous Twenties - and, in the finger, gives us Molly Petree, full of beans and conscious, dynamic the reader's arm as the story unfolds.

REVIEW: Molly Petree's story reminds me so a long way of an American, post-Civil war retelling of "Jane Eyre". Orphaned by the Chivalrous War, Molly lives in a dysfunctional and damaging area with her elderly uncle and an brand of servants and intimate. Stunted, an old friend of her parents' appears on the episode and pays for her to conduct boarding academic world. The headmistress of the Boarding Aim is not Molly's biggest fan, irrevocably leading to her departure the academic world as soon as origination and a brief alter as a teacher. Submit Molly's life takes an snappish turn, in the function of she cascade for a wild, enclose man, turns down two long forgotten on practiced suitors to marry him, inauspiciously loses multipart youthful, and her husband is mysteriously killed. Molly irrevocably takings to a a long way altered Agate Hill in the suspension of the exotic.

The tolerate story of this exotic is a letter from an rebellious grad pupil, writing to her coach that she has materialize a diversity of narrate entries and documents detailing Molly's life. The incredibly exotic is told in the form of letters and narrate entries. I did savor the epistolary nature of this exotic, especially in the same way as it allows you to see Molly from multipart perspectives. In spite of everything, it does refuge gaps in the performance in the same way as Molly does not until the end of time history because of.

It took me a while to get into this exotic, but I through up enjoying it. One of my summit frustrations was how characters call and hence refuge, never to persist. For example, Mary Ineffective is Molly's best friend as a youngster but the reader never learns what happens to her as soon as she suddenly trees Agate Hill. Similarly, the readers gets to read a lot about the headmistress of Gatewood Seminary, Mariah Flurry, in the same way as her narrate entries are included, but her exterior, which able-bodied was amazing, is only alluded to and never on view. I was any incensed to never learn on about Simon Black, Molly's sponsor. He remained a creepy character because of, appearing and becoming extinct without any apt notes of his strange interest in Molly.

My long forgotten summit frustration was the 360 in Molly's sticker from elderly to adult. I hint her happen chanced suddenly, and compelling to lead changes a person, but it just didn't jive for me. Owing to her elderly, Molly until the end of time references how she doesn't want to stow youthful, and yet her powerlessness to stow a in detail youngster is irrevocably what destabilizes her marriage. The overturn, precautious youngster of Agate Hill seems vigor like the social butterfly who winds up full of beans in the mountains, illogically in love with her husband.

STARS: 3.5


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