Eden - by Olympia Vernon (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A "profoundly raw and gripping" novel of a young girl in Mississippi struggling with poverty and a troubled family (The Baltimore Sun).

In Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield has just impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother's response is to force her to spend weekends nursing her Aunt Pip-an outcast who lives on the edge of town.

Now Maddy moves between her own home--which she shares with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother and her drinking, gambling, womanizing father--and Commitment Road, where she serves as caregiver for her aunt, who is dying of breast cancer. Grievances from the past have left Pip estranged from the family, but as Maddy spends time with her and her eccentric neighbor, Fat, she begins to discover the exhilaration of speaking your own mind and living life on your own terms--as well as the cost extracted by both. And as she confronts the injustice and cruelty of the world around her, she will come to understand both the burden and the blessing of her newfound knowledge.

"The rural countryside of Pyke County, Mississippi, resembles a scorched paradise--an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Maddy Dangerfield, who is reminiscent of Celie in Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Ellen Foster in Kaye Gibbons's eponymous novel, must grapple with a cruel, impoverished existence . . . As emotionally powerful as it is poetic, Vernon's raw and fierce first novel possesses a beautiful, albeit brutal, lyricism and introduces a strong new Southern voice." --Library Journal

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 how the real effects of racism take hold behind closed doors and how racial oppression is intimately linked to sexuality, power, and self-love. Vernon leads the reader in to the most intimate places unflinchingly and without apology." --Cara Hopkins