Moss on the North Side
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- Synopsis
- This is the story of Cary, a half-Indian girl who grows up in a pocket of southern backwoods poverty. It is also the story the indomitable spirit of a child, who, any standards but her own, would have been labelled "deprived." As the illegitimate child of a Cherokee tenant farmer and a white woman of promiscuous habits, Cary suffers--and survives--the special agonies of adolescence devoid of middle-class salves. Early in the book, she is witness to father's death and, bereft, she provides for his body a violent last rite. Outraged by loss, she rejects the livelihood offered by her mother. Withdrawal follows, and her battered emotions drive her to almost demented preoccupation with nature's mistakes, with nature's perversities, with the cruelties and deaths she sees all around her. Yet total loneliness pricks memory, and there remain for Cary lingering images of her Indian grandmother's enduring respect for the land, of her father's affinity with nature and of his natural wisdom. Impulsively, she turns to her only inheritance--a familiarity and rapport with things of the earth--and finds it a rich one. As the title suggests, Cary's ultimate view of life, and of human instinct, is defined for her by the course of nature which she recognizes as more often positive than perverse. In this knowledge, Cary refuses to deprive herself of human love. Written with the pureness of expression and uncompromising verisimilitude of its characters and setting, Moss on the North Side is a first novel of unsettling originality and artless beauty.
- Copyright:
- 1966
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 236 Pages
- Publisher:
- Houghton Mifflin Company
- Date of Addition:
- 06/21/15
- Copyrighted By:
- Sylvia Wilkinson
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Parenting and Family
- Submitted By:
- Marilyn
- Proofread By:
- Vanh Vue
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.