March 10, 2014
Howorth’s debut is a character-driven novel about family and friendship. Mississippian Mary Byrd Thornton is an ordinary person with one distinction: 40 years ago, her young stepbrother was murdered, and the killer was never found. One day she receives a call from a detective specializing in cold cases who tells her about new developments in the investigation and asks Mary Byrd to return to Richmond, Va., her childhood home, so her whole family can meet with him together in hopes of achieving “closure.” Mary Byrd is a winsome character, and the novel revolves around her, but other characters hold similar charms. Teever Barr is a local quasi-homeless Vietnam vet who bumbles through life, yet manages to land on his feet. Hubard Mann Valentine Jr. is the gay heir to a chicken empire. And Jack Ernest is a rakish ne’er-do-well who has an on-again, off-again relationship with Mary Byrd. Howorth paints her characters with a colorful palette and sketches the details of daily life with a sure hand. The murder case remains in the background throughout most of the novel; the story is decidedly more of a character study than a page-turning thriller, but Howorth’s characters are well worth getting to know.
June 1, 2014
An unvarnished picture of Southern life by debut author Howorth, co-owner of the storied Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.After many years, Mary Byrd Thornton receives news that her then-9-year-old stepbrother's unsolved murder is being reopened. In response, she breaks a plate-a Corelle plate, not her Spode china, because she has a "maddening way of second-thinking her impulses." As the loose plot follows Mary Byrd from the deep South to her hometown in Virginia to meet the cold-case detective, her impulses and second guesses set the tone. Most of the story takes the form of Mary Byrd's internal monologue, which can indeed be maddening. She's dedicated to her life as wife and mother in a small college town in Mississippi but unconvinced of her value or efficacy in those roles. She's antsy, too, alert for opportunities to escape into her small stash of prescription pills or dabble in infidelity as she has before. The result is a character who vibrates between self-castigation and stubborn defiance, like a teenager. She makes phone calls in a closet to avoid scrutiny by her family's longtime African-American housekeeper, Evagreen, sensing that she doesn't have the right breeding or attitude to earn Evagreen's respect. This and other moments where Mary Byrd recognizes her white privilege are awkward. She embodies a soup of self-awareness, liberal guilt and helplessness surely familiar-and uncomfortably accurate-to many white people. It's intriguing that Howorth's omniscient narration veers into Evagreen's thoughts at times and later spends a night in the mind of a homeless black man named Teever, a fixture in town. Both are dealing with their own tragedies but exhibit a grounded, confident quality that Mary Byrd lacks. How conscious a judgment this is on the author's part is hard to say.Howorth's dedication to capturing the messy, fraught and politically incorrect pieces of Mississippi life ultimately makes for a compelling read.
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May 1, 2014
On the eve of an important meeting with a semi-important photographer her art-gallery-owner husband is courting, Mary Byrd Thornton gets word that her presence is required in Richmond, Virginia, to meet with detectives who have new theories about the decades-old case of her stepbrother's murder. The trouble is, Mary Byrd lives in Mississippi, hates to fly, and needs to get out of town before an early spring ice storm shuts everything down. While exploring her various transportation options, including driving with Teever, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, or Jack Ernst, her sometime drug dealer and wannabe lover, Mary Byrd must also organize her householdher attitude-enhanced teenage daughter, Eliza; her space-geeky son, William; and her mostly absent husband, Charlesto function in her absence. And she'll have to do so without the help of her help, Evagreen, whose own daughter has just murdered her husband. It's all par for the course in the secretive, volatile Deep South for Howorth, who mined a tragic episode from her own personal history as dark inspiration for this buzz-worthy debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)