By Don Reid
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If we like a song of The Statler Brothers or a novella of Debbie Macomber, you'll be vehement that with O LITTLE TOWN, Statler Brother Don Reid has done his initial incursion into fiction. The Grammy Award-winning songwriter sets his anniversary story in a illusory city of Mt. Jefferson (modeled after his hometown of Staunton, Virginia).
It's only before Christmas in 1958; Elvis is on a radio, Eisenhower is in a White House and a pastor's 15-year-old daughter is shoplifting during Macalbee's Five and Dime. Other Mt. Jefferson families have their possess set of troubles. The impediment officer Buddy Briggs has only found out that his teenage daughter is profound --- and a news is going to come as a bombshell to Dr. Campbell Sterrett, whose son is a father. Dr. Sterrett, or "Camp" as he's known, is also traffic with his possess aging father-in-law, Walter, who wants to leave Lenity General Hospital in a midst of a hitch with a influenza to be with family for Christmas. In other scenes, a preacher's mother Dove is sleepy of being married to a apportion and, by vocation, being married to his assemblage and their needs, and keeps a embers intense with her adore seductiveness from a past.
There's a lot to keep lane of here between a characters and their doings, and a time change between a late 1950s and Walter's reminiscences about Christmas of 1904. Reid takes his impulse for one of a novel's 1904 subplots from a loyal story. In a author talk from a afterword, he tells readers that a roving playground unit performer, Eva Clark, was murdered in his hometown around a spin of a century. Each year to a benefaction day, an different chairman leaves flowers on her grave. In a book, Eva becomes Adrienne Knoles, an singer behaving a holiday play with her husband, Nicholas. Walter tells her story by a eyes of himself as a 16-year-old theatre child during a Crown theater.
Reid incorporates many good sum of a time period, including a soap "As a World Turns" (the many watched daytime play of 1958) and "White Christmas" sung by The Drifters. A younger era of readers might skip some of a World War II references that are not explained ("Anzio was a label persion compared to this"). The avalanche of approaching problems might feel like too many and too fictionally informed to readers (the tiny city with lots of secrets simmering only underneath a surface, a solitary profound daughter, a desperate medical diagnosis, a affair, a immature rebel minister's daughter), though Reid keeps all unresolved together and never lets anything turn some-more murky than a peaceful angst. He tends to tell rather than uncover ("Dove and Amanda indispensable any other this afternoon. They were confidants who knew what they pronounced would not go over a edges of a tiny list they were disposition into as they exchanged problems and solutions.").
But a really laxity of a tiny city troubles might attraction a characters to readers: a marital difficulties, frustrations of lifting children and coping with an aging parent. Reid incorporates some good themes of redemption and forgiveness as his injured characters find change.
All problems are orderly resolved in a finish (with an addition tidying adult any other lax threads), that is in gripping with a book's summary of holiday impulse and cheer. Statler Brothers fans and those who like a peaceful review will suffer Reid's incursion into fiction.
--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby. Contact Cindy during phrelanzer@aol.com.
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