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Edge of Heaven |
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 Edge of Heaven byEva McCall Bright Mountain Books 247 pages, October 2000 ISBN 0914875272 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart Eva McCall's first novel, Edge of Heaven, weaves together both fact and fiction as she relates stories she heard from her grandmother, Lucy Davenport Carpenter, a real person whom the novel revolves around. Lucy's story is heart-warming and suspenseful, a story of innocence, betrayal and acceptance. At seventeen, Lucy Davenport has never ventured off the Georgia mountain where she lived with her full-blooded Cherokee mother and her white father, Edmund. But it's 1895 and times are changing rapidly for the half-girl, half woman. Her two sisters have married and moved away, mother has recently died and Lucy and her father are left alone to cope. It's a hard scrabble life there on the mountain with only her dead mother's spirit and Jasper the dog to help her. Holman Carpenter's wife had died six months earlier, and he needs a wife to take care of his thirteen children (ages thirteen to six months). Edmund and Holman make a deal in which Holman takes Lucy as his wife, but it isn't until three-fourths through the book that readers learn why Edmund consented to the deal. The wedding is short and sweet and the new couple take off. Lucy is determined that Holman will never make her his "real" wife, and the scenes of their wedding night are funny as Lucy tries to run away. Holman, who also as no intentions of making Lucy his real wife, convinces her to stay. When they reach Holman's farm in North Carolina, Lucy meets the children. Some like her, some resent her, some don't even understand why she's there. Lucy spends the next two years plotting to run away to her Cherokee relatives. But the children, who desperately need someone to care for them, tug at Lucy's heartstrings. Along the way, readers meet Jake the peddler who captures her heart and offers her only real chance for escape; Bessie, the large, homely woman who befriends Lucy and teaches her to read; and the children - Annie May and Dovey - who stand out as ally and enemy. As time goes by, Lucy finds it harder to leave her new home. Although sickness and death hover around, it is love that will finally surround her. Edge of Heaven takes readers back to what life must have really been like in the late 1890s. Thankfully, the author rarely brings up the issue of Lucy's parentage (half white/half Cherokee). Its delineation is done very subtly, mainly through the use of teas and herbs learned from her mother. Some readers may judge a book by its first page; while this book does have a few flaws on page one, the author corrects them beginning on page two, and thus develops a marvelous, fast-paced and taut novel/biography. Edge of Heaven is McCall's first novel, and her talent for creating memorable characters is remarkable. With the last page turned, I still didn't want Lucy's story to end, wanting to know how her life would turn out on the mountain. A sequel to this captivating novel, entitled Children of the Mountain, is planned for release by the same publisher in Spring 2001. I can hardly wait. |
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