Jonathan Odell
Author of The Healing
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The tailored-for-bookclubs-title nothwithstanding, this was a pretty good read. Intertwining stories of two women, one white and one black, in small town Mississippi in the 1950's, it touches on various aspects of the early civil rights movement, a woman's sense of herself, and the importance of knowing and telling your own story. There are good women and bad men in it; there are also men who are not quite as bad as they think they are; women who are no better than they ought to be (that was show more my grandmother's gentle way of referring to women she liked all right, but didn't quite approve of); at least two very good men, and a whole lot of in-between people. Odell pokes fun at the foibles of humanity, and is not at all hesitant to give us irreverent one-armed bar-tenders, ancient one-eyed black women and clueless daddies who don't know what to do about their sons who hate wearing jeans and would rather play with homemade dolls than learn about baseball. All of the characters, with one exception, are sympathetic, at least to some degree. That exception, the Senator, is nobody's favorite human within the story. Black and white, rich and poor, male and female (including his fine wife) all have his number. He can make things happen, but no one admires him for it. There are hints of The Help in the way a group of black maids come to matter to one white woman in particular, and to the community as a whole. But in this novel these women seem to have a firmer grasp on their own stories right from the start, and the association between Miss Hazel and her own maid, Vida, begins with Vida holding all the cards. I enjoyed this story even while a part of my brain knew some of it is rather fanciful. The best comparison I can make is to Fannie Flagg's marvelous Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe. The book has recently been revised and re-issued, having originally been published in 2004 under the title The Road to Delphi. The author's note makes me believe that revision was probably a good idea, and I suppose changing the title was a smart marketing move, but I'd rather they hadn't done that. show less
Rating: 2* of five
The Book Description: "Compelling, tragic, comic, tender and mystical... Combines the historical significance of Kathryn Stockett's The Help with the wisdom of Toni Morrison's Beloved." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
Rich in mood and atmosphere, The Healing is a warmhearted novel about the unbreakable bonds between three generations of female healers and their power to restore the body, the spirit, and the soul.
In Antebellum Mississippi, Granada Satterfield has the mixed show more fortune to be born on the same day that her plantation mistress's daughter, Becky, dies of cholera. Believing that the newborn possesses some of her daughter's spirit, the Mistress Amanda adopts Granada, dolling her up in Becky's dresses and giving her a special place in the family despite her husband's protests. But when The Master brings a woman named Polly Shine to help quell the debilitating plague that is sweeping through the slave quarters, Granada's life changes. For Polly sees something in the young girl, a spark of "The Healing," and a domestic battle of wills begins, one that will bring the two closer but that will ultimately lead to a great tragedy. And seventy-five years later, Granada, still living on the abandoned plantation long after slavery ended, must revive the buried memories before history repeats itself.
Inspirational and suspenseful, The Healing is the kind of historical fiction readers can’t put down—and can’t wait to recommend once they’ve finished.
"A remarkable rite-of-passage novel with an unforgettable character. . . .The Healing transcends any clichés of the genre with its captivating, at times almost lyrical, prose; its firm grasp of history; vivid scenes; and vital, fully realized people, particularly the slaves with their many shades of color and modes of survival." —The Associated Press
My Review: I would ordinarily have consigned this to The Mouldering Mound of ~Meh~ had I not been so worked up over its sheer gracelessness, its plodding flatfooted ill-thought-out platitudinousness, and its breathlessly overwrought silliness.
Nauseous stuff. Granada...now did you get that? The character's name is Granada! We're on p114 and we must know her name's Granada six times in under a hundred words! Except the one time that she and her might give a slower reader a pause!...is presented as speaking and thinking in a bastard half-dialect speech pattern that drive me wild. Go big or go home, Odell. Use dialect a la Hurston or make it standard English.
Appropriate to the story and the time, uses of “He” and “His” for references to the christian deity got on my nerves almost immediately, and three hundred pages later had worked me into a frothing frenzy of loathing. This adolescent exceptionalism on behalf of an allegedly immortal and omnipotent being is culturally insensitive and intellectually indefensible.
But wait! There's more!
Gran Gran, as she (remember now!) comes to be called, takes lessons in healering from the hated Polly who is of course the beloved Polly and she (remember now!) becomes a healer known in three counties and even, at the end of her long life, takes on another soul to bring up in the ways of healering, called Violet, who has a Shocking Connection to Gran Gran!
Oh good gawd, I can't go on. If three hundred and thirty pages of exclams and pseudodialect do not cause you to long for a swift and merciful death, go on and read it. Maybe, if you liked The Help, this will give you some pleasure, being The Help set in slave times.
For my part, I will daub myself liberally with baboon dung before I will pick up another highly praised Southern-set novel. show less
The Book Description: "Compelling, tragic, comic, tender and mystical... Combines the historical significance of Kathryn Stockett's The Help with the wisdom of Toni Morrison's Beloved." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
Rich in mood and atmosphere, The Healing is a warmhearted novel about the unbreakable bonds between three generations of female healers and their power to restore the body, the spirit, and the soul.
In Antebellum Mississippi, Granada Satterfield has the mixed show more fortune to be born on the same day that her plantation mistress's daughter, Becky, dies of cholera. Believing that the newborn possesses some of her daughter's spirit, the Mistress Amanda adopts Granada, dolling her up in Becky's dresses and giving her a special place in the family despite her husband's protests. But when The Master brings a woman named Polly Shine to help quell the debilitating plague that is sweeping through the slave quarters, Granada's life changes. For Polly sees something in the young girl, a spark of "The Healing," and a domestic battle of wills begins, one that will bring the two closer but that will ultimately lead to a great tragedy. And seventy-five years later, Granada, still living on the abandoned plantation long after slavery ended, must revive the buried memories before history repeats itself.
Inspirational and suspenseful, The Healing is the kind of historical fiction readers can’t put down—and can’t wait to recommend once they’ve finished.
"A remarkable rite-of-passage novel with an unforgettable character. . . .The Healing transcends any clichés of the genre with its captivating, at times almost lyrical, prose; its firm grasp of history; vivid scenes; and vital, fully realized people, particularly the slaves with their many shades of color and modes of survival." —The Associated Press
My Review: I would ordinarily have consigned this to The Mouldering Mound of ~Meh~ had I not been so worked up over its sheer gracelessness, its plodding flatfooted ill-thought-out platitudinousness, and its breathlessly overwrought silliness.
”I told her I ain't nobody's pet!” Granada snapped, stomping her foot.(p114, US hardcover edition)
He looked back at Granada. “I'm sorry for it, Granada, but you best get on back to that sick house. Master ain't fooling around.”
Granada couldn't believe it. Chester was scared of Polly, too!
On her dawdling return to the hospital, she thought about what Chester had told Sylvie, the part about the master throwing Polly in a ditch. Granada sure liked the sound of that. Aunt Sylvie always said that without somebody to grieve you into heaven, you might not be able to find your way,
“Humph!” Granada thought. “That woman don't belong in heaven! If God is great, He's going to bar the door!” And if there was anything she could do to keep her out, she would gladly do it twice.
That was it!
Nauseous stuff. Granada...now did you get that? The character's name is Granada! We're on p114 and we must know her name's Granada six times in under a hundred words! Except the one time that she and her might give a slower reader a pause!...is presented as speaking and thinking in a bastard half-dialect speech pattern that drive me wild. Go big or go home, Odell. Use dialect a la Hurston or make it standard English.
Appropriate to the story and the time, uses of “He” and “His” for references to the christian deity got on my nerves almost immediately, and three hundred pages later had worked me into a frothing frenzy of loathing. This adolescent exceptionalism on behalf of an allegedly immortal and omnipotent being is culturally insensitive and intellectually indefensible.
But wait! There's more!
Gran Gran, as she (remember now!) comes to be called, takes lessons in healering from the hated Polly who is of course the beloved Polly and she (remember now!) becomes a healer known in three counties and even, at the end of her long life, takes on another soul to bring up in the ways of healering, called Violet, who has a Shocking Connection to Gran Gran!
Oh good gawd, I can't go on. If three hundred and thirty pages of exclams and pseudodialect do not cause you to long for a swift and merciful death, go on and read it. Maybe, if you liked The Help, this will give you some pleasure, being The Help set in slave times.
For my part, I will daub myself liberally with baboon dung before I will pick up another highly praised Southern-set novel. show less
Southerners are often portrayed in literature and the media as uneducated, bigoted racists. There are some Southern folks who fit into this easily pigeonholed categorization but the reality is often much more complex and nuanced than that, even in the pre-Civil Rights era. Jonathan Odell looks at these complicated racial relationships in small town, 1950s Mississippi in his newly reworked novel, Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League, a National Reading Group Month Great Group Read.
Hazel and show more Vida loathe and distrust each other. They share a terrible similarity, each having lost a son, but they are not friends. Forced together by circumstance, Hazel's husband has hired Vida as their maid after Hazel's drunken accident following the death of her boy, the two women, one white and one black, are wary and resentful of each other. Hazel is from poor white hill people but her husband is forward thinking and successful. No matter how many Lincolns he sells, he can't buy her way into the top echelon of society in Delphi though; she will always be an outcast. Vida is the protected daughter of a black preacher who often acts as the good faith go-between between the black community and the whites with power. But even her daddy's status cannot save Vida from the dangerous and mean Billy Dean Brister, county bully and Sheriff. She is still a powerless black woman who must work for a white family to earn a living and must endure the terror and threats of the hateful and racist in the town. As these two women grudgingly spend time together, they come first to a truce and eventually to the complicated relationship that allows them to join together with the other disenfranchised, maids and prostitutes, to expose and resist the evil in town.
Odell is ever mindful of the clear, unwavering racial divide in small Southern towns and he shows the varying types of racism that abide therein: unconscious, entrenched and courtly, institutionalized, and rabid and volatile. He also touches on class and the ways that it can contribute to oppression, both as a unifying force and as a divisive one. The characters here are fascinating, even if certain of them are occasionally stereotypical. The events of the novel are firmly set in the historical context of major Civil Rights events, showing that there were movements, small than on a nationwide scale, occurring all over, mirroring and encouraging those well known actions. The pacing was fairly slow and the hard work of Hazel and Vida's changing relationship was mostly passed over but the ideas of segregation, the power of hatred, making a stand, loss, motherhood, and corruption shine throughout all the varied threads of the narrative. The challenge to the racist status quo is well done although it is somewhat troubling that it takes a white woman's involvement to rally the black women's community to action. Odell's novel builds on a wealth of well written Southern novels that go before him, broadening our view of the time without trivializing, sentimentalizing, or demonizing the people and the place as a whole. He shines another light on the bravery and power of the dismissed and repressed to change their (and our) world even in the face of hatred. This is a story to pay attention to. show less
Hazel and show more Vida loathe and distrust each other. They share a terrible similarity, each having lost a son, but they are not friends. Forced together by circumstance, Hazel's husband has hired Vida as their maid after Hazel's drunken accident following the death of her boy, the two women, one white and one black, are wary and resentful of each other. Hazel is from poor white hill people but her husband is forward thinking and successful. No matter how many Lincolns he sells, he can't buy her way into the top echelon of society in Delphi though; she will always be an outcast. Vida is the protected daughter of a black preacher who often acts as the good faith go-between between the black community and the whites with power. But even her daddy's status cannot save Vida from the dangerous and mean Billy Dean Brister, county bully and Sheriff. She is still a powerless black woman who must work for a white family to earn a living and must endure the terror and threats of the hateful and racist in the town. As these two women grudgingly spend time together, they come first to a truce and eventually to the complicated relationship that allows them to join together with the other disenfranchised, maids and prostitutes, to expose and resist the evil in town.
Odell is ever mindful of the clear, unwavering racial divide in small Southern towns and he shows the varying types of racism that abide therein: unconscious, entrenched and courtly, institutionalized, and rabid and volatile. He also touches on class and the ways that it can contribute to oppression, both as a unifying force and as a divisive one. The characters here are fascinating, even if certain of them are occasionally stereotypical. The events of the novel are firmly set in the historical context of major Civil Rights events, showing that there were movements, small than on a nationwide scale, occurring all over, mirroring and encouraging those well known actions. The pacing was fairly slow and the hard work of Hazel and Vida's changing relationship was mostly passed over but the ideas of segregation, the power of hatred, making a stand, loss, motherhood, and corruption shine throughout all the varied threads of the narrative. The challenge to the racist status quo is well done although it is somewhat troubling that it takes a white woman's involvement to rally the black women's community to action. Odell's novel builds on a wealth of well written Southern novels that go before him, broadening our view of the time without trivializing, sentimentalizing, or demonizing the people and the place as a whole. He shines another light on the bravery and power of the dismissed and repressed to change their (and our) world even in the face of hatred. This is a story to pay attention to. show less
It has long been documented that stories bring people together and keep cultures alive. One might even argue that stories are what separate man from beast. Stories have long been told to inform, to entertain, to educate, and even to warn. Underlying all of that though, is a story’s power to heal rifts, to bridge gaps between time, place, people, and even souls. It is this power that Jonathan Odell explores in his second novel, The Healing.
The stories in question are told by the elderly show more Gran Gran, a former slave and healer called on to heal one last person, a little girl traumatized to an almost catatonic state by the death of her mother. Each story slowly brings the little girl out of her shell. As she reminisces on her past and unburies long-dead spiritual injuries, Gran Gran uncovers the need for her own healing. The reader in all of this storytelling becomes an active participant. She is sitting next to Gran Gran and the little girl at the table, as Gran Gran starts another tale. He is working alongside Granada as she experiences life first inside the plantation house and then with Polly Shine. By the time Gran Gran and the little girl each recover from their own spiritual ailments, the reader too finds herself eerily soothed by Gran Gran’s life lessons. It is as if unknown injuries on the part of the reader are also healed by Gran Gran’s words. It is an immensely powerful experience that bears testament to Mr. Odell’s thorough research and skills at writing.
What makes The Healing truly special is the fact that each of the characters, no matter how small a part, are incredibly realistic and oh-so memorable. Aunt Sylvie’s tirades in the kitchen, Little Man’s confusion about the loss of his friend, Granada – both as a young girl completely oblivious to the world in which she was born and as a lost, elderly woman, dear old Polly Shine, and even the multitude of nameless slaves. Each of the characters burst from the page in a way that is breathtaking, engulfing the reader in his or her story no matter the length. As a result, the reader forgets time and place as s/he experiences the trouble on the Satterfield plantation, both past and present.
The Healing is a tremendously powerful novel about nurturing body and soul and the dangers that lurk when one forgets to take care of either. The Healing is not just a work of fiction for Mr. Odell. His novel is a labor of love that is giving a voice to all those whose stories were perilously close to being lost forever. He is not just preaching about the power of story to heal, but he is acting on that lesson to heal all readers and even an entire culture. For this reader at least, he succeeds.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for my e-galley! show less
The stories in question are told by the elderly show more Gran Gran, a former slave and healer called on to heal one last person, a little girl traumatized to an almost catatonic state by the death of her mother. Each story slowly brings the little girl out of her shell. As she reminisces on her past and unburies long-dead spiritual injuries, Gran Gran uncovers the need for her own healing. The reader in all of this storytelling becomes an active participant. She is sitting next to Gran Gran and the little girl at the table, as Gran Gran starts another tale. He is working alongside Granada as she experiences life first inside the plantation house and then with Polly Shine. By the time Gran Gran and the little girl each recover from their own spiritual ailments, the reader too finds herself eerily soothed by Gran Gran’s life lessons. It is as if unknown injuries on the part of the reader are also healed by Gran Gran’s words. It is an immensely powerful experience that bears testament to Mr. Odell’s thorough research and skills at writing.
What makes The Healing truly special is the fact that each of the characters, no matter how small a part, are incredibly realistic and oh-so memorable. Aunt Sylvie’s tirades in the kitchen, Little Man’s confusion about the loss of his friend, Granada – both as a young girl completely oblivious to the world in which she was born and as a lost, elderly woman, dear old Polly Shine, and even the multitude of nameless slaves. Each of the characters burst from the page in a way that is breathtaking, engulfing the reader in his or her story no matter the length. As a result, the reader forgets time and place as s/he experiences the trouble on the Satterfield plantation, both past and present.
The Healing is a tremendously powerful novel about nurturing body and soul and the dangers that lurk when one forgets to take care of either. The Healing is not just a work of fiction for Mr. Odell. His novel is a labor of love that is giving a voice to all those whose stories were perilously close to being lost forever. He is not just preaching about the power of story to heal, but he is acting on that lesson to heal all readers and even an entire culture. For this reader at least, he succeeds.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for my e-galley! show less
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