Sweet Angel Band and Other Stories - Softcover

Kinder, R. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0962746029 ISBN 13: 9780962746024

Publisher: Helicon Nine Editions, 1991

Synopsis

Book by Kinder, R. M.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Kinder, winner of the first Willa Cather Fiction Prize, offers 15 stories about growing up female and surviving adulthood as a proto-feminist in the bootheel of Missouri--stories that are sharply textured with family quarrels and homage to bluegrass and gospel music. Many of the pieces concern Cora Leban, a mother, musician, and independent spirit who grows up (and out of) a community where some women--Anna, for instance--``did not know how she had lived without church.'' Music is the only redemption; love fails to suture pain or provide much in the way of relief. In the book's early stories, the narrow, judgmental voice of the community makes itself heard- -especially in ``Craryville Box''--and a range of voices dramatize family conflicts and a shifting balance of power in which women hold their own--against a rigid and failing husband in the title story, against a son who takes after the father who deserted him in ``Bloodlines.'' These early stories also establish the down-and-out texture of life in Missouri's bootheel--using the outhouse, hunting for leeches, learning not to trust. In ``Cora's Room,'' Cora returns home to her bitter mother Oida to find the separation between them too great to bridge; in ``The Prowler,'' Cora, slowly losing her hearing, borrows a .38 from her ex-husband, a cop ``on the rape detail,'' and waits, refusing to draw her drapes, for a Peeping Tom. In ``Cora's Letter,'' the last summing-up story, Cora writes to her mother about a lover who was arrested for murder and about ``the kind of thing mothers and daughters don't talk about.'' At their best, these hardscrabble stories--grounded in bleakness but with moments of beauty--have a delicacy of vision and acute sense of place reminiscent of Olga Masters. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Most of the women in these 15 stories lead lives of quiet desperation. Like Cora, a recurring character, they seem to invite loneliness, to bear a desolate wistfulness for a past they never experienced. Winner of the 1991 Willa Cather Prize for Fiction, Kinder writes of her native Missouri with painfully little attention to detail or geography, opting instead for an all-too-literary exploration of inner landscapes as manifest in physical symbols: canker sores, toothaches, long red hair, pale skin, bad knees. In "Painting," a facile correlation is drawn between Cora's indecision over painting her kitchen and her hesitancy in killing her blind, old dog. Cora visits her sick, aging mother in "Cora's Room" and is repulsed by the old woman's obsessive, pathetic attempts to connect by cooking. There is a muted violence permeating these stories, an ironically smug anguish that begs for expression. Often engaging, they are generally leaden downers.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Society, Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Helicon Nine Editions
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0962746029
• ISBN 13: 9780962746024
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 141