Luck - Softcover

Eric B. Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184982200X ISBN 13: 9781849822008

Publisher: M P Publishing Limited, 2005

Synopsis

On a hot August day in the heart of tobacco country, Harvey and Ox are driving County Route 1012, smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. With one fateful swing, a bomb intended for the Olive family blows the boys to pieces, scattering their remains in the ditches and on both sides of the dotted yellow line. Behind the explosion lies a story of young love, family feuds, and the cultural clash of a changing South -- a place where Mexican migrant workers are transforming the face of North Carolina, one town at a time. In Cottesville, these migrant workers find an unlikely champion in 20-year-old Mike Olive, a rich farmer's boy who has returned home from college bent on social justice. Mike knows he can expect trouble from his family, his friends, and his old rival Harvey; what he does not expect to find is Hermelinda Salmeron, the extraordinary daughter of one of his father's workers. With explosive energy, Luck lays bare the strange collision of fathers and sons, lovers and rivals, Mexico and the American South, the future and the past.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Martin attended Duke University, where he was involved in a documentary project on Mexican migrant workers in the South. He now lives in San Francisco.

From Publishers Weekly:

Migrant labor reform roils a close-knit community of Southern tobacco farmers in this tense and provocative examination of social issues. The Mexican migrant workers who toil on the tobacco plantations in Jackson County, N.C., are subjected to many abuses by landowners who stubbornly refuse to recognize that slavery has ended. Handsome 21-year-old Mike Olive, son of Cottesville's wealthiest tobacco farmer, Clayton Olive, spends a hellishly hot summer in his hometown with a team of fellow Duke University students assigned to document the economics, sociology and history of Mexican migrant labor. The team ultimately becomes active in a battle for human rights for the workers. As Mike begins to question his own family's complicity in the abuses, he falls in love with Hermelinda Salmeron, the strikingly beautiful 17-year-old daughter of a laborer at the Olive camp. One-time childhood friend Harvey Dickerson still resents Mike's family's inheritance of the rich farmland where the Olives and Dickersons used to work side by side. As the temperature rises above 100 degrees, rumors of Mike's relationship with a Mexican girl and the growing abuses at the Dickerson plantation create tension in the community. First-novelist Martin deftly chronicles the plight of the Mexican migrants and illuminates the barriers that thwart understanding between Southern landowners and workers. The luck that gives the book its title is certainly not all good, and Mike, Harvey and Hermelinda are caught up in the twists and turns of fortune. Retaliation against Mike's reforms comes in the guise of a suspicious fire and a vigilante's mail bomb, underscoring in its violence Martin's Faulknerian sense of twisted justice. Agent, Jennifer R. Walsh at the Writers Shop. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 184982200X
• ISBN 13: 9781849822008
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276