Jamie Quatro

The Prophet sat opposite a row of windows facing a propane plant on the other side of the river. Even from inside he could smell the sewage-like stench of the gas. A lavender dusk settled up around the bridges and behind the big houses on the hills, the air thick and gauzy with wet.

An old man living alone on Lookout Mountain, Alabama gets by selling vegetables and sometimes the paintings he makes of his visions to tourists. His son has largely disowned him, although he does try to get his show more father to get treatment for his cancer. One day, the Prophet is at a junkyard and sees a teenager across the road in the company of two adults and realizes that something is wrong. He hatches a plan and ends up nabbing her and taking her back to his isolated property. Once she has withdrawn from the drugs she was being given to keep her compliant, she forms a cautious relationship with the Prophet, and as her health improves, his diminishes.

This is a hard book to describe since so much of what happens lies in the differences between the realities of the different characters. The Prophet has a lot of beliefs and views that most of us would disagree with, and Quatro does a beautiful job of illuminating his reasoning. Here he is in his son's SUV:

He reminded himself that the truck and private school were part of a corrupt system of greedy money mongers with their pig snouts mucking around in the troughs of the workingman. He looked at the dashboard with its fancy lights and cellular phone in its holder, he looked up at he movie screen in the ceiling and the naked dolls littering the back seat and floor, and he tried to ignore the being-proud feeling. All size and no modesty. That was the problem with America. It wasn't enough to just drive somewhere, you had to make a big show and a lot of noise doing it.

Quatro has set herself quite the task with this novel. She is writing about an isolated old man who has religious visions and the kind of beliefs that cause him to live in an isolated area. She has him rescue a sex trafficking victim and lets the reader sit with the discomfort of an old man keeping a teenager in his cabin. And she makes something beautiful and also something starkly realistic with that. Quatro uses different narrative techniques and refuses to give us the teenage girl's point of view until late in the book. She pulls all of it off and then some. The way the book ends is something I'll be thinking about for a very long time. show less

This is Jamie Quatro's first published book and in these stories you can see her working towards her first novel, Fire Sermon. Which is to say, many of the stories are iterations on the same scenario, a pretty blonde Evangelical woman engaged in an emotional affair with a man who is not her husband. While it's interesting to see how a writer moves toward a novel, the accumulation of stories ends up feeling self-indulgent when collected together. It's in the other stories where her viewpoint show more becomes more interesting. Quatro writes about a specifically Evangelical faith, mostly centered in the South (specifically in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, an exurb of Chattanooga), from within that faith, but with a discerning eye and a willingness to write honestly about how people actually live. This isn't "inspirational fiction" by any stretch.

In one story, an elderly woman sets out to walk to the post office, but becomes disoriented the further she gets from her house. In another, told from the perspective of her young daughter, a paraplegic woman is included in an invitation for a pool party held for members of a church, but no one thought about the stairs to get there. The church men rally together to carry her up to the patio, where she is left alone as the rest of the congregation comfortably gathers at the other end. And in the weirdest story, a small congregation follows the deaf man who shows up one morning into some very transgressive behaviors.

Quatro has mentioned that she is influenced by Flannery O'Connor in her writing about believers, and while she doesn't approach O'Connor's Southern Gothic aesthetic, she shares her fearlessness in pointing out their weaknesses and hypocrisies from within the faith. She's an interesting writer and while this short story collection has its flaws, it indicates the direction she was already heading. show less

He sketched his visions with pencils on wood on whatever he could find. Cardboard boxes, newspaper scraps of plywood. When he got a sketch the way he liked he painted over it. Recently he finished three small paintings on white paper, all showing a donkey with wings standing on planet Earth. Celebrating donkey, big tears donkey, bags of trouble donkey. He’d grown fond of the animal, the way he kept showing up. Painting it was like spending time with a friend.

This will be one of my special show more books, not a literary favorite, but a one I’ll remember fondly. I read the audio version, excellently narrated by Christina Delaine with a perfect Southern accent.

The Prophet’s real name is Winston. The Prophet’s story would be perfect for a Coen Brothers’ film. Think “Brother, Where Art Thou”. But this tale is no Odyssey.

The story opens with the Prophet who is a man in his 70s living off-grid on a mountain in rural Alabama. Uneducated and prone to semi-religious hallucinations. The Prophet’s pictures are painted in words most stunningly by Jamie Quatro.

The plot revolves around The Prophet rescuing a teenager, a girl called Michael who is being sex-trafficked. Michael is a recovering addict and The Prophet who is in the early stages of dying, looks after her until she is well enough leave.

The Prophet has always been dirt-poor but he’s been having hallucination only since his wife died. It was then he that he moved to the mountain where he built his hut around a tree. Some of these hallucinations feature the devil who The Prophet named Two-Step. With his thumbs in his trouser belt-loops , Two-Step appears in a frame to The Prophet. As with many of his hallucinations The Prophet turns then into unframed paintings.

The book looks back on The Prophet’s married life. Before his wife died he had a son, Zeke whom he took with him to the mountain. Zeke was unable to talk until he was four, and then with a stutter that would only ever disappear when he sang.

The Prophet wondered if the boy had some known he’d have this impediment and had chosen to keep silent in order to delay the struggle. Walker County put him in special-needs classes all day. After four months they decided to keep him home. Social workers came to visit and his wife showed them the books she read , the math worksheet the school sent home. They gave her some forms to sign agreeing to administer a standardized test every so often. After that, the county left them alone.

At 14 Zeke leaves home to the big lights and makes it as a Country and Western star. From time to time he visits his dad and tries to help him take modern cures for his illness and attempts to get him to use a cell phone. All in vain.

As to what happens to The Prophet, Michael, and Zeke I’ll have to leave it there. For the paintings alone, this book is worth reading. To summarize, Quatro has taken a sad song and made it better. show less

This book was my best surprise of the year. To be honest, I just picked up a random book from my shelf. I decided that I would just take a very un-calculated risk and pick up whatever book my eyes went to - and this book was it.

Fire Sermon is an incredible novel following the journey of a religious woman who begins to have an affair on her husband. The narrative is not your typical romance novel, it's truly a dramatic unfolding of the character. I loved this character study and how show more beautifully Jamie Quatro could write out this woman's feelings and experiences. Seriously, it blew me out of the water. I truly did not expect this book to be half as good as it was.

Jamie Quatro has a beautiful writing style, full of metaphors and truly engaging descriptions. This book could have been a real flop because of the subject matter, but it had me hooked at every single word. There isn't one thing I would change about this book because it truly was just mesmerizing. I highly recommend it! I'm almost frustrated that I didn't read it sooner! This is one incredible, lovely and amazing piece of literature that I think anyone who loves drama and riveting reads should pick up.

Maggie has a 'romantic' relationship with her husband, but begins to fall in love with an intellectual poet. She's cheating on her husband, but doesn't know how to deal with it. The sex with her husband isn't all that great and it hurts, but she feels like she owes him his pleasure. The more she engages in infidelity, the more she questions herself. Can someone truly fall out of love or change their feelings about someone? Will God understand what she has done?

Even if you're not religious, I think this book is an excellent view into one woman's perspective. Yes, it's fiction but it does really open your eyes to another world. The struggles and changes in a woman's life can be more troublesome than one thinks and I loved that Jamie opened us into Maggie's world. The story is absolutely breathtaking.

Five out of five stars.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. show less