Then Like The Blind Man
Then Like The Blind Man
Overview
Synopsis:
At nine, Orbie seems to live his life along a precipice. He is burdened with an overabundance of difficult choices which would be beyond the capacities of most boys his age—but Orbie is about to discover that he's no ordinary boy. In the debut novel from artist and poet Freddie Owens, nothing is ever precisely what it seems: prejudice is not innate, the dead aren't really dead, and those in positions of power cannot be trusted.
Orbie finds himself deposited at his grandparent's home in Kentucky one summer, his stepfather, Victor, having had a change of heart about including him on a family prospecting trip to Florida. Except "heart" doesn't seem, to Orbie, quite the right word to apply to his stepfather, whose tempestuous temper took him from the widowed family's salvation to its most dangerous element in one outburst flat.
With no end to his stay in sight, Orbie finds himself settling into routines all but unthinkable weeks before. He becomes fast friends with the Kingdom Boys, who he'd have happily kept himself segregated from back home in Detroit, though he now finds that skin color is not the best indicator of trustworthiness. He forms a strong bond with Willis, the stunningly talented, physically disabled black boy connected to his grandparents via their mysterious friend Moses, who may call down the rain.
Orbie's story is driven by elements of magical realism. Dreams melt into prophecy; Orbie learns to part the clouds and peer into the past, with charismatic Moses as an occasional guide. He'll need these newfound abilities, and the curious new maturity they bestow, when Victor and his mother unexpectedly return, tumult behind them and an incredible storm at their front. Orbie watches as his world is rent and, as his family slips closer to the maelstrom, finds himself wondering this: at the last, why do we wish to save that which we once needed to destroy?
Then Like the Blind Man is an electrifying porthole to the South of the '50s, where, though inane prejudice may have dominated, kindness and justice also had a place. Orbie's sharecropping grandparents, by defying convention with unnerving grace, become founts of colloquial wisdom whose appeal is impossible to resist, and the Orbie they nurture—the best version of a boy who may otherwise have been lost—is someone the reader comes to love. These are characters with incredible heart and appeal, and the turbulent world they inhabit is magnetically drawn. Ethical and spiritual challenges abound in this intelligent and unusual tale, and readers will be enlivened and edified by its climactic moments.
Michelle Anne Schingler / ForeWord Reviews
- ABNA Quarter Finalist
- IRDiscovery Award for Best In Literary FictionFinalist: Kindle Book Review's Literary Fiction Award
- Kirkus Review's Star for exceptional merit
- Featured in Kirkus Review's Trade Magazine
- Honorable Mention: Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards
- Retailers, Libraries and Educators can get the book via Ingram Wholesale
- Available from Bookstores Nationwide
- Amazon Bestseller
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940162955511 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blind Slight Publications |
| Publication date: | 11/26/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Composite Personae
My parents moved from Kentucky to Detroit soon after I was born. Detroit was where I grew up. As a kid I visited relatives in Kentucky, once for a six-week period, which included a stay with my grandparents. In the novel’s acknowledgements I did assert the usual disclaimers regarding the book's fictional complexion, i.e., it is a made-up story whose characters and situations are fictional in nature (and used fictionally) no matter how reminiscent of characters and situations in real life. That’s a matter for legal departments, however, and has little to do with subterranean processes giving kaleidoscopic-like rise to hints and semblances from memory’s storehouse, some of which I selected and disguised for fiction. That is to say, yes, certain aspects of my history did manifest knowingly at times, at times spontaneously and distantly, as ghostly north-south structures, as composite personae, as moles and stains and tears and glistening rain and dark bottles of beer, rooms of cigarette smoke, hay lofts and pigs.
Two memories served as starting points for a short story I wrote that eventually became this novel. One was of my Kentucky grandmother as she emerged from a shed with a white chicken held upside down in one of her strong bony hands. I, a boy of nine and a “city slicker” from Detroit, looked on in wonderment and horror as she summarily wrung the poor creature’s neck. It ran about the yard frantically, yes incredibly, as if trying to locate something it had misplaced, as if the known world could be set right again, recreated, if only that one thing could be found. And then, of course, it died. The second memory was of lantern light reflected off stones that lay on either side of a path to a storm cellar my grandparents and I were headed for one stormy night beneath a tornado’s approaching din. There was wonderment there too, along with a vast and looming sense of impending doom.
Cormac McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Carver, O’Conner and Joyce Carol Oates are among my literary heroes and heroines. The reader might feel their influence as I try to make one word follow another, to “stab the heart with...force” (a la Isaac Babel) by placing my periods (hopefully, sometimes desperately) ‘... just at the right place’.
Freddie Owens (aka Fredrick Owen Wegela)www.freddieowens.com