Lum is offered a new trajectory for her life.Book Synopsis Lum and Abner by : Randal L. It cuts through family lands and community beliefs and offers up that heartbreaking combination of destruction and opportunity that “progress” brings. In it is a collection of “freak” postcards and among the photos of dog-faced girls, albinos, and lion-faced men she creates an imaginary community.Ĭhange arrives, as it must, in the form of the building of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And then there’s the valise she carries with her everywhere. A rich banker offers her an intellectual connection. She’s attracted to one of the outcast Melungeons. There’s an African American man with whom she is friends the most that is possible. Ware does a good job showing Lum’s loneliness as she searches for belonging through a connection to other outsiders. She has learned to negotiate through the side eyes and mutterings of “morphydite” directed her way. Her family protects her from the larger community with its undercurrent of violence towards anyone different. She has valuable, if poorly appreciated, work. She’s given small rooms, sometimes just sheds to live in, and carries one small valise of clothes and treasures with her. As such, she’s used as an itinerant, unpaid servant by her family and moved from house to house as her help is needed with newborns or aging grannies. But she’s also considered unmarriageable which places her in the spinster role from an early age. She’s considered a girl, which seems to be what is most comfortable to Lum as well.
She’s “diagnosed” as a child and her family fits her into their rigidly conformitive lives the best they can figure out. Lum is what would have then been called a hermaphrodite, these days someone with an intersex condition. In the case of this novel, there’s the title character Lum. It can take people we know existed, because they’ve always existed, and write them back into history.
It can preserve history, especially the history of marginalized people that would otherwise be lost to us. What kept me reading was how well Ware accomplishes what, for me, is a central purpose of historical fiction. And it’s a debut novel written by an author, Libby Ware, who is older than what is considered the “norm.” (Whatever the heck that is.)Īll of these qualities made me want to read the novel. And here’s a novel set in the Virginia mountains during the Depression which means it’s set close to the people and the time of my father’s youth. I’m a sucker for well-written historical fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
