Minrose Gwin

I have a love of historical fiction and a fascination with weather so this book caught me on two levels. Promise is a fictional tale about the very real F5 tornado that hit Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1936. Ms. Gwin’s grandparents lived in the area at the time and survived the event. She includes a slew of photos in the afterward from the news coverage of the day and from the historical society that allows the reader to fully appreciate the fury of the storm.

The book focuses on two families; show more one wealthy and white and one poor and black. The white family includes the Judge, his wife, son and daughter Jo. The black family story is centered on Dovey the matriarch but it also features her husband, grandaughter and great grandson who is the book’s namesake. Dovey is the laundress in town and she works for the Judge’s family. It’s a tortured history for a number of reasons. I don’t want to delve into too deeply for the sake of not spoiling plot points.

This is a book that forces you to think and to read slowly. It doesn’t read like a typical book and it some ways it’s a bit scattered but these peoples’ world was just blown apart by winds that probably reached over 250mph. The book takes place right after the Depression so race relations place a big role in the story. For example – as Dovey is searching for her family after the tornado she is directed to a certain area but she is warned that no one is writing down the names of “the coloreds” nor are they counting the number of colored dead.

Just think about that for a minute. The black people that died LITERALLY didn’t count. To this day they do not have an accurate death toll due to this.

White women do not fare much better in the tale. Their purpose seems to be to satisfy the needs and wants of white men. Aaaaah, the good ‘ole days. As I noted, it’s a thought provoking books and some thoughts provoke more than others.

I found that the mood was set from the first page and Ms. Gwin carried the mood through the to last page. I can’t say that all of my questions were satisfactorily answered but I don’t think they were meant to be. This was a time that just was not fair to people of color or to women for that matter. I was left with a semblance of hope for the future for the characters which is what a reader wants when they become as invested in them as you do with a book as compelling as this one is. I find myself still thinking about it well over a week after I finished it. Ms. Gwin built her world well and populated it with memorable characters. I can’t wait to read what she writes next. show less

Minrose Gwin explores the aftermath of a tornado that struck Tupelo, Mississippi on April 5, 1936, through the experiences of two women. Jo McNabb is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a local judge living in a comfortable brick house and Dovey Grand'homme is a grandmother and a laundress who works for the McNabbs. As their paths intersect, the connections and divisions between them become clear and what the path forward might be.

This novel is a straightforward historical account based on the show more stories the author was told by family still living in Tupelo, as well as meticulous research. Gwin has done her homework. There are two very different stories being told here; a coming of age story of a girl who finds her strength in getting her injured mother and infant brother through the crisis and figuring out where the truth lies, and the much grittier story of Dovey and her family and their survival despite the callous indifference and sometime hostility from the white half of town.

He fired a second shot. She felt it whizz by her head. The first shot hadn't much to say except get the hell out of Dodge, but this second one sang in her left ear, over the drumbeat in her head, over the sound of the train whistle no signaling the arrival of another Frisco, over all the shouting and crying out in the streets. It sang to her like an opera singer. It sang to her like a blues singer. It sang all the nastiness of white folk, all the ugliness of the world. It sang of dirty linen, the spots that won't come out, the tears in the fabric.

While Promise was often predictable and sometimes smoothed over the rougher events, it was nevertheless a highly readable novel about an event I'd known nothing about. show less

One decision has the power to send a life off course. A big enough decision can send several lives off course. When birds spin out of their usual habitats or migratory paths, they are called accidentals. But people too can be accidentals, out of place and alone, as are the characters in Minrose Gwin's newest novel, The Accidentals.

In 1957 rural Mississippi, about an hour from New Orleans, Olivia McAlister finds herself pregnant again. Already depressed and stifled by her very constrained and show more prescribed life as a wife and mother, she who had grown up in New Orleans and worked during WWII, Olivia cannot go through with another pregnancy and so she makes the fateful decision to have a backwoods abortion. This decision will reverberate in her family's life for decades, leaving her husband reeling, her daughters motherless and adrift, and will eventually touch the lives of those completely unrelated to her. This botched abortion sets off a chain of events that feels both inevitable and deeply sad.

Grace and June are Olivia's daughters and they are forever marked by their mother's decision, leading them to make their own fateful choices. The chapter narration switches back and forth, mostly between Grace and June but also including the first chapter from Olivia, chapters from their father Holly, and from Ed Mae, a black woman working in an orphanage for white babies, and Fred the Ambulance Driver, who responds to a call from that orphanage. The very disparate voices allow Gwin to both tell aspects of the story that Grace and June couldn't possibly know without forcing information where it doesn't belong and to show how each decision in one life ripples out and affects others seemingly unconnected. The novel takes on a plethora of social issues: abortion, teenage pregnancy, adoption, homosexuality, racism, opportunities for women, and so much more as it spins through some of the major events (the moon landing, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Challenger disaster, and Obama's first presidential campaign to name a few) of the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. The novel has an air of deep, pervading sorrow weaving through it, a story of lives lived out of place and alone. It moves slowly through Grace and June's early lives but then picks up speed and races through their adulthood, skipping quickly through large swathes of time, sometimes leaving the reader a little confused as to just where the story stands in time. The pacing is uneven and the ending is both too tidy and out of keeping with the rest of the novel. Despite this, the writing is beautiful and it is clear that Gwin is talented, if perhaps a little lost at the end. Her McAlisters are a family broken by their mother's death, young women who continue to cycle through feelings of betrayal and a desire for forgiveness throughout the years, never quite regaining their closeness but always remaining tied to each other, no matter how loosely. show less

Historical fiction set in the aftermath of the tornado that devastated Tupelo, MS, on Good Friday, 1936, Promise takes on a lot of tasks. It tells the story of two women—one young and white, one black and older—struggling to find loved ones in an almost apocryphally destroyed town, and Gwin does a good job of conveying the enormous swath of damage wrought by the storm. There are multiple odysseys, and the juxtaposition of age vs. youth but chiefly, as it should be, the ways the show more characters' journeys and impressions separate (and, as it turns out, are connected) along racial lines. Gwin confronts the systemic racism of the time and place—the black dead were simply not counted, for instance, making their recovery a whole degree of magnitude harder than that of the whites—but this still works better as Story than Statement. There are parts where that story dithers a bit, and plenty of places where it is probably not as hard-hitting as it should be—although I'd also argue that this is not necessarily that book. And it was ultimately an absorbing read—bonus points to the author for some moments of kindhearted foreshadowing beyond the parameters of the book—hitting on a couple of my current interests: natural disasters, and the mindset of service. show less