Bøger af Joyce Hinnefeld

These are stories of awakening, but not in the "rite of passage" sense so familiar to American fiction. Here we awaken from the dream of the life we've been living purposefully for a long time. The five stories of The Beauty of Their Youth give a pointed precision to an insight that haunts Joyce Hinnefeld's fine novels, namely, that mistaken perceptions and misguided decisions, rather than tragic flaws that must destroy us, are inextricably part of the ordinary texture of our lives. Our flaws, not foreign or ultimately even "wrong," are intimately at home among the characteristic peculiarities that define our humanity. This is a vision that understands without excusing, joining the past self to the future self, and one person to another, in a community in which we share responsibility for the stories that we tell.

In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentuckys Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers troubles. Poor and single, Mazes mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeths mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter. The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Mazes earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day. Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love.This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.