Download Ebook Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle
If you still need much more books Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle as referrals, going to search the title as well as theme in this site is offered. You will discover more whole lots publications Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle in different disciplines. You can additionally when possible to read guide that is already downloaded and install. Open it and also save Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle in your disk or gadget. It will certainly alleviate you wherever you require the book soft data to check out. This Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle soft file to read can be recommendation for everybody to improve the skill and also capacity.
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle
Download Ebook Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle
Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle Just how can you transform your mind to be a lot more open? There several sources that could help you to boost your thoughts. It can be from the other encounters and also story from some people. Schedule Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle is one of the trusted resources to obtain. You could locate plenty books that we discuss below in this website. As well as now, we reveal you among the very best, the Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle
Even the rate of a publication Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle is so inexpensive; lots of people are truly thrifty to reserve their money to acquire guides. The various other reasons are that they feel bad as well as have no time to visit guide company to look the book Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle to read. Well, this is modern-day period; a lot of publications can be got effortlessly. As this Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle and also a lot more publications, they could be entered quite quick ways. You will certainly not have to go outside to obtain this publication Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle
By visiting this web page, you have done the best looking factor. This is your beginning to pick guide Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle that you really want. There are great deals of referred books to review. When you intend to obtain this Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle as your e-book reading, you could click the web link web page to download Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle In few time, you have possessed your referred e-books as yours.
Since of this book Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle is offered by online, it will certainly alleviate you not to print it. you could obtain the soft data of this Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle to save in your computer system, gizmo, and much more tools. It relies on your willingness where and where you will read Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle One that you have to always remember is that checking out e-book Secret Keepers: A Novel, By Mindy Friddle will certainly endless. You will have going to review various other book after finishing an e-book, and it's constantly.
At age seventy-two, Emma Hanley has finally made a plan to get out of small-town Palmetto, South Carolina, and travel the globe with her husband. But when he dies suddenly, just before their departure, she's taken up with the problems of her grown children. Her once free-spirited daughter, Dora, turns to compulsive shopping and a controlling husband, hoping to blot out her wayward past. Her son, Bobby, still lives with her, struggling with the illness that robbed him of his childhood promise.
But then Dora's old flame Jake Carey returns to Palmetto with a broken heart and a gift for gardening, and soon the town is filled with mysterious, potent botanicals and resurgent memories. Before long, Jake and his group of helpers begin to unearth the secrets that have divided the Hanleys for decades.
- Sales Rank: #701987 in Books
- Published on: 2010-05-25
- Released on: 2010-05-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .69" w x 5.50" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In her second novel, Friddle (The Garden Angel) returns to the family plot for the surprising story of a dysfunctional Southern family, a long-buried secret and the possibility of redemption. Aging housewife Emma Hanley lives in Palmetto, S.C., but dreams of traveling the world; unfortunately, her long-planned European vacation must be postponed when her erstwhile husband up and dies after his regular Saturday coffee klatch with a gaggle of female admirers. Left alone, Emma must learn to deal one-on-one with her mentally troubled son Bobby, born-again daughter Dora and the ghost of son Will, who was killed in Vietnam. While her family goes to pieces, Emma lets her yard go to seed; enter gardener Jake Cary, Dora's old flame, whose efforts to cultivate Emma's garden soon spill into her family life. With fluid prose and telling details, Friddle deftly captures the downward pull of the past and the Southern penchant for mythmaking; transcending the easy stereotypes of Southern dysfunctional family sagas, Friddle's clan is a genuinely quirky lot with its own unlikely ideas of happiness. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Mindy Friddle received the Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose from the South Carolina Arts Commission for 2008--2009. A master gardener, she lives in Greenville, South Carolina. Secret Keepers is her second novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The town had moved the Confederate Monument from the square to the gates of Springforth Cemetery some twenty years after the War of Northern Aggression, and General Robert E. Lee— who stood atop the mossy marble with a scowl— had never quite recovered. The general was listing, slowly sinking in the boggy soil, his finger pointing no longer at the ghostly Union brigade ahead, but just down and to the left, toward the new Ideal Laundry Factory, as if to demand extra starch. The stony glare of the good general was the last thing Emma Hanley’s grandfather saw as he sat at his mahogany desk in his office, pondering a lost factory— foreclosure by some outfit up North was imminent— and an astonishing sweep of bad investments. As he swallowed the muzzle of a Colt .45, William McCann peered at the general, who seemed to look back at him approvingly, a kinship that comes from being beaten down by Yankees.
William McCann’s self- inflicted gunshot on that brilliant spring day in 1908 made a mess of things. But then, he never did have a head for business. In those days, a man was born with his fortune, and occasionally he increased it, but he never lost it. And McCann, who’d never quite cottoned to the textile industry, had managed to lose everything, as his widow, Josephine, quickly discovered. The tree- lined estate in town went first, the family’s seasonal residences next— the seaside place in Charleston, the summer bungalow in the Blue Ridge Mountains— everything inside them auctioned off, crated, and shipped down to the pickle forks and finger bowls, how could they?
They could; they did. The wealthy in Palmetto had little sympathy for downfall brought about by a gentleman’s folly. Travel lust, for example. Seduced by the lure of far- flung jungles, perilous crags, and shimmering deserts, McCann had, for some time, been obsessed by exotic botanicals. He fancied himself a plant hunter— ignoring his failing business and leaving behind his wife, Josephine, for months at a time, appeasing her with promises of civilized travel fit for a woman upon his return.
A pity, many in the town noted, that shortly before her husband’s unfortunate firearm accident— for that is what the family thereafter referred to it as, an accident, a man simply cleaning his gun— Josephine McCann had already sent a steamer trunk to Paris, in preparation for a season with her daughter, Angeline, on the Continent. That voyage was canceled, the trunk recalled. Without means, the McCann women found themselves stuck in Palmetto, South Carolina.
The financial snarl untangled, the fortune unspooled, and the McCann women’s property shrank to a dot on the map, to a single address: Amaranth— a staid Victorian at the edge of town, built on a whim a decade previously, on land McCann had purchased purely for its rich, well- drained soil, fierce fecundity, and eastern light.
At Amaranth, the widow Josephine insisted decorum remain. Linen napkins, yellowed as old teeth, were used at all meals, as well as a few remaining pieces of silverware, the handles heavy as guns. In time, daughter Angeline— who had not been a debutante, having lost that privilege along with other trappings— settled for a young soldier as a husband, a doughboy. The poor soul lost his mind on the battlefields of France and never found it again. Angeline moved from her brief newlywed venture back into Amaranth with her mother. Six months later, Emma arrived, born into a house hold of women pining for escape, who continued to insist they were trapped in a decidedly lower station in life, a station from which there was no leaving the town, at least not in any sort of civilized fashion.
But that was going to change, finally. For on this unseasonably warm April morning nearly eight de cades after her grandfather’s firearm mishap, Emma Hanley, seventy- two, found herself just days away from embarking on a journey of a lifetime. The Trip, as her husband, Harold, referred to it— often while rolling his eyes— a cruise to Europe.
That was the year spring rushed through the town, barely stopping. By April, a morning stroll produced clammy sweat at the nape of one’s neck— a sure sign of an approaching brutal summer. But this harbinger of a merciless season did not overly concern the people of Palmetto, as it would have years before, back when a cruel season made airless lint- filled mills suffocating, left crops dead, farmers unpaid, and children unfed. Now, there was central air, office jobs, and grocery stores. Cable television brought news all day and all night— reports that the Berlin Wall might soon fall, rumors the Japanese were buying up Hawaii, hotel by hotel. There was a rosy- cheeked president well into his seventh decade for whom Emma Hanley did not much care, though she did find some use for him: When Harold protested that Emma and he were too old to take the Trip, she reminded her husband that the Leader of the Free World— a man for whom Harold had twice voted— was even older.
That was the spring when Emma’s life took a dramatically new course, and it all started that Saturday morning in April 1987, a day when Emma was happier than she’d been in years— studying her itinerary, wondering about comfortable shoes and all- weather cloaks, peering at her husband across the stack of maps and Fodor’s Guides on the dining room table, nodding pleasantly as he announced he would soon be heading to the Biscuit Basket for his daily coffee klatch. For in the last few weeks, travel plans had brought to the Hanley marriage an unexpected spirit of compromise. Nowadays, when Harold sucked his teeth or stayed too long at his breakfasts, all Emma had to do was think of the Trip, and a thrill like harp strings would thrum inside her, and she would be happy again.
“Look here at this mess,“ Harold said now, holding up the morning newspaper. “No respect for the dead.” Emma glanced up from the brochure she was reading on converting foreign currency. CEMETERY VANDALS STRIKE AGAIN! the headline on the front page of the metto Newseamed, and there was a picture of the general himself— festooned with toilet paper and what appeared to be Hawaiian leis, looking, appropriately enough, drunk and rakish. Behind the statue, streamers drooped over the rusty iron spires of Springforth. Harold studied the article. When he read silently, his lips moved. “Says here, kids done it,“ he said. “Teenagers and their parties.” He shook his head.
“Perhaps someone at town hall will remember now to fix the memorial,“ Emma said cheerfully. There had been talk about repairing the Confederate Monument for years, and restoring the cemetery, and doing something with the old mill and all the rest, but then the town would forget, and nothing happened. It was as if the people of Palmetto just stopped seeing the statues, the shuttered cotton mills, the vandalized graveyards. They drove right by, sealed behind their tinted car windows, sipping their travel mugs, nodding their heads to music. Even the McCann saga had apparently been wiped from the town’s memory. Although the old cotton factory— with the McCann name fading on the brick— remained, and there was still a McCann side street and, for a short time, a shopping center with the name, no one except Emma herself and her friends Miss Gibble and Lila Day associated the McCann name with lost fortune or with penniless women lamenting their strangled fate. Come to think of it, Emma reflected now, perhaps the town’s collective amnesia wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“Gonna be a hot one today,“ Harold said, reading aloud now the detailed weather forecast— complete with humidity levels and wind directions— in that halting way that set Emma’s teeth on edge. Tripshe thought, the Trip.
She smiled. “Good, it will be nice to get away. They say that London is cool this time of year.”
Harold grunted in agreement. He remained a reluctant traveler. Now that they had a little savings and an abundance of time, he had finally agreed to venture overseas because, as Emma reminded him, he owed her this favor. He owed her because de cades of installing appliances meant Harold had spent years in women’s kitchens, which led to having coffee with them, or iced tea and a slice of pound cake, accompanied by long talks and she didn’t know what all. She didn’t care to speculate. Oh, Harold had cultivated himself quite a following in Palmetto, all right, though Emma had never put her foot down. Well, perhaps a few times, many years before: knock- down drag- outs that ended with seething anger, threats of leaving, a violent clashing, damp sheets, and, nine months later, a child. Three of these battles had names: Will, Dora, and Bobby.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“I’ll get some Sanka later.” He put on his jacket. “Sure you’re not coming?” “Not with all the things I’ve got left to do.” It was part of the Hanleys’ new unspoken agreement: He
would pretend to demand Emma come along to his morning coffee klatch with all those adoring widow women as vigorously as she would decline. With the Trip on the horizon, Emma was perfectly happy to send him off to the Biscuit Basket, and he knew it. Her interests remained elsewhere: across the Atlantic, where, according to their itinerary, they would be within a week at the dazzling Dutch Capital of Amsterdam with its quaint, cobbled streets, steeply gabled merchants’ houses, and famous museums and galleries. Yes, thought Emma, after thirty- seven years of marriage, she and Harold were enjoying some well- earned equilibrium, at least temporarily. A regular cease- fire. For what was marriage but a treaty between two warring little nations, a congress of conflicting desires and wills?
“There is one little thing, before you go,“ she said.
&ldquo...
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Engrossing and Well-Written
By Nancy Williams
A great balance of well-written prose (you keep your brain cells active!) and engrossing characters (you can't help but turn the pages). I found myself looking forward to my nightly read to learn more about what would happen next to Emma Hanley, her adult children, and her grandchildren. (The book narrates a summer's events from many of their perspectives.) The writing had a great comic touch and was particularly strong in all matters gardening. What I liked most about this book (and I found the same was true of Mindy Friddle's first book, The Garden Angel) were the characters: endearing, quirky, yet all too human, each with their own foibles. During my morning walk not long after finishing the book, I found myself ruminating over Jake, Dora, and Bobby, some of the main characters in the story, as though they were real friends or neighbors. A great summertime read!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Some good points but fizzled at the end
By Kel
This book set off a variety of thoughts and opinions while I was reading it. First, I thought it began a little slow. The novel is about a family Emma, who just lost her husband, Dora her daughter, Bobby, Emma's mentally disturbed son and Kyle, Dora's son. Emma is trying to adjust to being a widow. A likable character, I liked the transformation the author made with her. She goes from a passive wife to a strong, ambitious widow. Dora is married to Donny. Donny is very religious and down right rigid. Dora accepts this marriage as a punishment for her actions long ago. She is living with guilt from the past. This guilt transforms her from a rebellious wild teenager to a meak, lost soul who is so consumed with her own issues, she can't see through the blinders she has put on. Kyle is a typical teenager. He has incredible love and patience with his Uncle Bobby and together they take a job with a landscaper, Jake, who has just returned to his childhood town. Jake is also an ex-boyfriend of Dora. The middle of the novel picked up and peaked my interest. I was excited to continue the story. I loved the characters Emma and Kyle. I could not stand Dora. The author was on a roll until the end. I felt a bit cheated. I thought there were things missing from this story. I didn't think the author did a very good job resolving the conflicts. I appreciate the gardening tie in with the rare flower the landscapers were planting through the town. But the author pulled the plug on this part of the story too soon, I thought, and almost made it irrelevant. I am not thrilled about this book and hesitate to suggest it to anyone. There are too many other, better reads out there to waste time on this one.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An okay read; didn't peak until the end.
By Alayne
I had high hopes for Secret Keepers. I'm not ashamed to admit I judge books by their covers and this one is fabulous. The synopsis uses words like "wayward past," and "old flame," and "mysterious, potent botanicals and resurgent memories." Sounds good right? Unfortunately Secret Keepers didn't really find its true potential until the last third of the book, at which point it was nearly over.
Secret Keepers circles around Emma Hanley and her children. Told in alternating past/present snippets, we learn that Emma's ancestor had a penchant for gardening with foreign plants; her oldest son died in a war; her other son hears voices and sees people who aren't there; her daughter Dora was once wayward and lost until she became found by a religious zealot; and Dora's teenage son Kyle is trying to balance his father's religious demands with dreams of his own. Then Dora's old flame comes back to town, stirs stuff up, and all hell breaks loose. So much potential, just not a stellar execution.
Secret Keepers plods along until the end when things get fanciful and dramatic and one whiff of a flower sends people reeling in memory to their favorite places and times. It seems like it was trying to be magical realism, but took to long to figure that out. In general, I am left feeling underwhelmed and slightly disappointed that it didn't peak until the end.
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle PDF
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle EPub
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle Doc
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle iBooks
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle rtf
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle Mobipocket
Secret Keepers: A Novel, by Mindy Friddle Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar