Playing with Matches

Starred review from May 21, 2012
Wall’s stunning second novel (after Sweeping Up Glass) tells the heart-wrenching tale of Clea Shine, a precocious girl growing up in the shadow of a northern Mississippi prison in the 1980s. Clea, a white girl, has always lived with her black “aunt” Jerusha and Jerusha’s sister in False River, a stone’s throw from the house where her mother frequently entertains guards from the prison and other local men. Though she loves Auntie, Clea’s longing for her mother often sends her across Potato Shed Road, where she sees too much and gets too little from her mother. Meanwhile, Clea consorts with colorful characters including separated conjoined twins born with three arms between them, a boy who lives in a tree, and another boy being held captive under a neighbor’s house. Traumatized and heartsick, 12-year-old Clea flees after she sets fire to her mother’s house, with disastrous results, and only returns to False River two decades later when a tropical storm destroys her own house and she discovers that her husband is unfaithful. Wall’s talent and empathy are evident in this story of learning to forgive. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International, Inc.

June 1, 2012

Clea Shine's view from her auntie's window is a particularly desperate fragment of the deep South: abandoned buildings, a flood-prone river, a prison, and a house where her mother works as a prostitute. Despite the bleak surroundings, Clea has a bright outlook: she is smart and she loves the patchwork family that is raising her. Only when she attends school does Clea become aware of her outsider status: she is ahead of the other students academically, she is white, and her mother is the town pariah. It is this last stigma, and the certainty that her mother will never love her properly, that leads Clea to an act that will haunt her forever. The second--and somewhat less focused--part of the novel describes Clea as an adult: married, the mother of two, and the author of a published memoir. Her return home on the eve of a hurricane forces her to face several questions from her past. Wall (Sweeping Up Glass) successfully interweaves a series of family and small-town mysteries, although at times the resolutions seem rushed. VERDICT An introspective novel about personal redemption set in the modern South; best for readers of literary fiction.--John R. Cecil, Austin, TX

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
Clea Shine hates her mother, a whore who gave away her daughter an hour after her birth. Growing up poor but loved in the nearby home of Auntie Jerusa Lovemore in False River, Mississippi, Clea is a bright girl, excelling in everything but subtraction (because she objects to the idea of taking anything away) even as she endures teenage boys' drunken taunts directed at her mother. When she's 12, Clea acts on her emotions, seeming to start a fire in her mother's house that kills passed-out-drunk Clarice Shine and her two male visitors. Fearful of arrest and imprisonment, Clea runs away to make a life for herself, including writing and publishing her story. Years later, she takes her two children, leaving her storm-damaged home and unfaithful husband, to return to her roots and unfinished business, only to face a hurricane, an apt metaphor for her life that provides more opportunities for atonement. Wall (Sweeping Up Glass, 2008) redefines family in this expressive novel that explores love, pain, guilt, and, most notably, redemption.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)