Playing the Bones
Lady Margaret Redd (Author photograph) Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [10], 262 pages. Signed by the author on the half-title page. Rather than planning her wedding, proper Texas girl Lacy Springs becomes involved in an affair with a local blues star, Black Jesus, and begins an obsessive pursuit of him while journeying into her own past to find the reasons why she keeps falling for the wrong men. Louise Redd is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, where she earned a master's degree in creative writing. She is the author of Playing the Bones. Playing the Bones embodied for Redd the dreamy culmination of lifelong literary aspirations, hard-earned writing degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, two years of struggle in front of a computer screen in rural Colorado, and several months’ worth of sleepless nights as she awaited an eventual thumbs-up from the faceless publishing world in New York. “The year between my finishing the book and its publication was absolutely golden,” Redd remembered, chuckling at her naiveté. “The day Little, Brown made me an offer, my parents and I celebrated with a bottle of champagne, and I was just filled with hopes and fantasies that once the book came out everything would be wonderful, that I would suddenly be smarter and more charming and more loved and better looking than ever before. But when my book hit the bookstores, the only people who seemed to notice were members of my immediate family.”Redd would soon discover that there is a general indifference to the culture of fiction writing and that the superstore monopoly is partly to blame. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Equal parts recovery manual, travelogue and tall tale, Redd's first novel sings a bluesy ballad about Lacy Springs, an attractive young Texas schoolteacher wrestling with her dark and disturbing past. Raised in Dallas by her wealthy, abusive mother, Lacy, who teaches high-school English, lives in Houston with Ellis, her long-suffering fiancee. Ellis may be tender and understanding, but that's not enough to stop Lacy from sneaking out for wild assignations with blues musician Black Jesus, her volatile, sensual lover. Even "my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature does not prevent my heart from freezing up, and then thawing when I hear this man's foolish talk," she confesses. The story line traces Lacy's struggles to confront her demons. She's aided in this quest by a cut-rate New Age therapist, Eva, a loopy grad student in a Velcro-fastened turban, but when Lacy can't face Eva's questions, she scribbles lyrics on a legal pad, recasting into comfortably abstracted songs the themes that trouble her. Like the turbulent lives of the blues musicians she admires, Lacy's own existence grows increasingly dramatic as she juggles the promise of a stable domestic routine with Ellis and her exciting, sometimes violent, time on the road with Black Jesus. As the action shifts through the South, from Houston to Graceland, Redd provides evocative descriptions of a world where restaurants serve "salsa so hot it drives the confusion right out of your head." The plot takes some broad twists that leaven the solemnity of Lacy's revelations but also come close to trivializing them. On the whole, though, this is an engaging and affecting examination of one woman's determined search for self-affirmation. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Lacy Springs, Black Jesus, Texas, Schoolteacher, Dallas, New Age, Therapist, Graduate Student, Valcro-fastened, Turban, Lyrics, Songwriting, Blues, Musicians, Graceland
ISBN: 0316735116
[Book #84932]
Price: $125.00