About this item
Highlights
- After critics raved over Olympia Vernon's first novel, Eden, Vernon returns to the Deep South for the story of Logic, a young girl struggling to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as "the butterflies floating inside" her.As a child Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree-an accident that precipitated her transformation into a young girl lost in her own world.
- Author(s): Olympia Vernon
- 272 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
After critics raved over Olympia Vernon's first novel, Eden, Vernon returns to the Deep South for the story of Logic, a young girl struggling to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as "the butterflies floating inside" her.As a child Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree-an accident that precipitated her transformation into a young girl lost in her own world. Logic's mother has secretly wished that Logic had not survived, and she now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic's father bestows upon his daughter in her adolescence. As her mother retreats into her work as a neighborhood midwife and Logic's father collapses into paranoia, Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.
Book Synopsis
After critics raved over Olympia Vernon's first novel, Eden, Vernon returns to the Deep South for the story of Logic, a young girl struggling to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as "the butterflies floating inside" her.As a child Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree-an accident that precipitated her transformation into a young girl lost in her own world. Logic's mother has secretly wished that Logic had not survived, and she now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic's father bestows upon his daughter in her adolescence. As her mother retreats into her work as a neighborhood midwife and Logic's father collapses into paranoia, Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.
Review Quotes
Praise for Logic
"Olympia Vernon's 2003 novel Eden put the reading world on notice that a bright and original voice had arrived. Her second novel, Logic, only confirms that strong promise... Vernon draws on her considerable strengths as a writer here: She is unafraid of the graphic sexual image; indeed, she seems drawn to the dark places where humanity faces its greatest test." --Susan Larson, New Orleans Times Picayune
"Vernon's imagery is more dense and dreamlike than even [Toni] Morrison's most haunting spells... Distinctions dissolve, material associations give way to almost mystical connections, and a kind of divine oneness glows off the page. Like Logic herself, the reader is no longer earthbound but levitating in a higher reason. The effect is both bewildering and bewitching. Vernon may take her story into uncharted territories of the imagination, but Logic will surely put her on the literary map." --Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle "Vernon writes with astonishing, original poetry that finds the perpetrator and victim in everyone. Steeped in religious, surreal imagery and references to ordering principles-atoms, alphabets, life's basic materials-Vernon's abstract language asks precise questions about the chances for survival in a lawless world where safety, love, and even joy are concepts, not realities." --Gillian Engberg, Booklist"Yes, in the land of American Idol and The Bachelor, there remains a segment of the public that relishes experimental fiction that challenges the heart and the mind. Vernon's second novel explores the disjointed reality of a teenage black girl in rural Mississippi. After a fall from a tree, the girl's perceptions are both sharpened and blunted." --USA Today
"[Tightly] written and... provocative in its language... Logic is the sort of literary book that readers will read and re-read, always finding new twists and meanings... Vernon takes readers out of their air-conditioned detachment and thrusts them into this troubling environment where they can learn something from her characters' experience." --Greg Langley, Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate
"This intense and dramatic story is riddled with darkly rich characters, strange but unmistakably real. Crafter by a brilliant author, the characters come alive, stunning and shocking the reader with their desperate intensity. This is an emotionally driven prose winning comparisons to Toni Morrison." --Blytheville Courier News
"Vernon's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, 2003's Eden... will undoubtedly remind readers of early Toni Morrison, particularly The Bluest Eye... Vernon's alchemical imagination transforms passages... into a whole as startlingly original, disconcerting and haunting as a fever dream." --Publishers Weekly