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Though the women are as different as water and wine—Icey is feisty, hot-tempered, and impulsive, while Tee Wee is more submissive and disciplined—both are driven by a passionate determination to give their children a better life. Through trying times, they are the pillars, fierce and resilient; yet they celebrate life with a love of food, music, and family that makes even the most traumatic moments endurable. The illicit love between Tee Wee’s daughter Crow and the white landowner’s son Browder; the heartbreaking death of one of Icey’s children, for which she will blame herself; the murder trial of Tee Wee’s youngest son which threatens to tear apart not just their family but the entire town—all these events are interwoven with occasions of joy, including Crow’s fulfillment of her lifelong dream and Tee Wee’s own hard-fought success.
A richly emotional epic spanning two decades in the Deep South, the story of Tee Wee and Icey and their families are a prism through which we view the universal—racial strife, dysfunctional families, secrets and redemption. Illuminated by a resonant storytelling voice and dialogue that rings loud and true, Right as Rain provides indelible portraits of indomitable characters and an almost tangible sense of place, while revealing a deep understanding of race in mid-century America’s rural south.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 18, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307416544
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307416544
- File size: 681 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 16, 2004
"In the moonlight she fantasized that she and Browder were silver people, not black or white, but only different shades of pure sterling." The fantasy belongs to beautiful Crow, whose mother, Tee Wee Weathersby, cooks for Browder's mother, Euylis Parsons. Crow and Browder love each other truly, madly, deeply, but it's 1958 in Zebulon, Miss., and race is fate. Bestseller Marshall (Walking Through Shadows
) is an extraordinary storyteller. A master of spoken and internalized speech, she keeps the reader in intimate proximity to her large cast as she weaves her various plot threads, moving deftly from 1940 to 1968. There's laugh-aloud humor in the ferociously competitive friendship between Tee Wee and Icey Hamilton, who hires on as the Parsonses' maid and moves into the other tenant house on the farm; the scene in which the two women mud wrestle is priceless. And there is plenty of heartbreak, too, particularly when Icey loses her son Memphis in a senseless accident. Marshall's great triumph is her ability to convey the humanity of all her characters, male and female, black and white. Even those stock villains of Southern racism, the sheriff and the district attorney, seem victims of an inherited ethos. There's a touch of Hollywood in the long homicide trial at the end of the book, but Tyler Powers, the long-haired, Harvard-trained white lawyer whom Crow hires to defend her little brother, J.P., beautifully makes the point that in Mississippi of 1968, it's the whites who need to be freed. 5-city author tour.
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