Book Reviews
Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt weave this strong, tightly knit love story in alternating chapters that begin when Jack, grieving over Ruby's death four months earlier, evokes the past. In flashbacks, the two richly cadenced Southern voices explore their vastly differing backgrounds, troubled histories and their unlikely but loving marriage. Born into a proud, prominent country family, coddled and adored, Ruby stuns her parents and two brothers by inexplicably running off with John Woodrow, a migrant worker who savagely abuses her. When John is killed in a brawl, Ruby, too proud to ask her family for help, begins doing housework for the wealthy Hoover family, where she meets Jack, a laconic, immensely capable tenant farmer on the Hoover land. He is 40; she is 20. Both lonely and vulnerable, they regard each other cautiously, carry on a wary courtship and embark on a firmly grounded marriage. The union is enriched by a small, supportive circle of friends, who, like the couple's landlord, Burr, are sharply etched and convincingly drawn. Gibbons, author of the critically praised Ellen Foster, has written a vivid, unsentimental, powerful novel.
Publishers Weekly
Alternating chapters narrated by Ruby Stokes (who is dying of cancer at 45) with those told by her husband, Blinking Jack, after her death, Gibbons creates a scrapbook of their quarter century together as tenant farmers. Too old and tough to be endearing like the protagonist of Ellen Foster, the Stokeses are no less honest and vivid as they consider the value of a good mate or good soil. Gibbons again flawlessly reproduces the humor and idiom of rural eastern North Carolina in Ruby's proper country dialect and Jack's peculiarly awful grammar. Recommended for public libraries and collections of regional fiction. —Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, NC
Library Journal