Eden - by Olympia Vernon (Paperback)

About the Book

A "profoundly raw and gripping read" ("The Baltimore Sun"), Olympia Vernon's fearless and wildly original debut novel is a lyrical tale about a young black girl in the Deep South who comes to confront the realities of sex, race, disease, and mortality.

Book Synopsis

Olympia Vernon's fearless and wildly original debut novel explodes on the first page and sustains a tightrope intensity until the last. Eden is a lyrical tale about a young black girl in the Deep South who comes to confront the realities of sex, race, disease, and mortality. When fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield draws a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in fire-engine-red lipstick during Sunday school, the rural black community of Pyke County, Mississippi, is scandalized. Her mother, mortified by the small-town gossip and determined to teach Maddy the perils of her youthful intelligence, forces her to spend weekends from then on caring for her estranged Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the wrong side of town and is dying of cancer. The lessons Maddy learns are ones that could not be taught in any church. In lush, vivid brushstrokes, Olympia Vernon conjures a world that is both intoxicating and cruel, and illuminates the bittersweet transformation of the young girl who must bear the burden and blessing of its secrets too soon. Eden is a haunting, memorable novel propelled by the poetry and power of a voice that is complex, lyrical, and utterly true.

Review Quotes

Praise for Eden

"Daring [and] explosively supernatural...[Eden is] a startling reminder of how forceful Southern magic can be...The message is simple, though profound: love and death destroy difference, devouring us al...Vernon's talent...is as green and growing as those country fields where her ghosts lurk." -Ann Powers, The New York Times Book Review

"Astonishing....These are the primal scenes, the bare elements of melodrama, the Morrisonian, Faulknerian, Southern Gothic family secrets, familiar in their very atrocity....Vernon's voice sometimes takes on an Orphic authority, rising from vigilant observation and the magical force of language to make the ordinary new...With wild specificity, Vernon re-creates a universal existential moment: the quailing of the spirit in confrontation with 'death, my death." --Anya Kamentz, Village Voice

"A profoundly raw and gripping read: Vernon's is a new African-American and Southern voice with sustaining dramatic power that magnifies the human condition." --Jean Thompson, The Baltimore Sun

"The rural black Southern culture comes alive through language that is direct, sometimes raw, and frequently sensual and sexually explicit; characters limited by their lack of education, the poverty, and ongoing racial prejudice; and plot details that are both shocking and pathetic....Eden is a powerful novel in the tradition of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's work." --Susan Allison, Kliatt

"Sensual and disturbing, Vernon's debut novel has an intensity and lyricism...Vernon writes with a scary, deep knowledge of a very primitive place...The rural countryside of Pyke County, Miss., resembles a scorched paradise-an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world." --Hal Jacobs, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"An important story, not to be categorized by race or gender or region. Its truths are universal...Vernon relies on the highest philosophies of spirit to tell this story of the body, and she does so in a way that does not take it from the hands of the people of Pyke County, but shares it graciously with the hands of all...Vernon's prose is unapologetic; it rushes forward, soaring at times, grounded at others, unfettered by a strict genre of reality." --Kate Cantrill, The Austin Chronicle

"[Vernon is] a remarkable new voice...Eden offers symbolism galore: a lizard-like scar from breast cancer, the fattening hog oblivious to its own fate, Chevrolet's lost arm. But it's not the symbolism that is the strength of this book, it's the raw and fearless voice of Maddy whose candid observations turn the ordinary into the poetic." --Greg Langley, The Baton Rouge Advocate

"Vernon's exquisite, original language is pure poetry. She is a fearless writer, as unafraid of the graphic sexual image as she is of the tender gesture. One grows to love these characters, to become haunted by their losses, their desires, their hopes...[A] wild and unforgettable and utterly new, strong language for tough truths." --Susan Larson, The New Orleans Times-Picayune

"An empowering coming-of-age story based on acquiring the knowledge that all choices are going to cost you something...Vernon's writing is sensual and tactile...What she does best is delve behind the scenes of a racially charged environment. She shows