A Parchment of Leaves (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by Silas House
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Book Summary Information
Author: Silas HouseEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-26
ISBN: 0345464974
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of A Parchment of Leaves (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
Book Review: "To just be--that's the most noble thing of all"
Summary: 4 Stars
"I had always found comfort in leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds words of wisdom," says Vine, the protagonist of Silas House's 2002 novel A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES. In the early 1900s, in the midst of WWI, Vine is a young Cherokee woman growing up with her family in Redbud Camp, a Native American settlement in the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky. Rumors throughout the area posit Vine as a witch, a mystical woman who can kill with her beauty and make snakes dance at her command. These whisperings keep outsiders away from Redbud Camp--until one day, a brave young Irishman named Saul Sullivan and his younger brother, Aaron, march fearlessly up the mountain. After Aaron is bitten by a snake on the mountain, and Vine saves him, an immediate connection between herself and Saul is forged. Soon after, they are married, and she moves down the mountain, away from her family and into a world she doesn't know, taking with her only a yearling redbud tree to remind her of home.
Saul's mother, Esme, welcomes Vine unquestioningly--as do her surrounding neighbors, including Serena, a midwife who becomes a fast friend. But Vine struggles with missing her family; even the daughter she births, Birdie, cannot fill the void left by her family's absence. When the lumber company Saul works for sends him to another county to chop down trees to help with the war effort, Vine's loneliness deepens.
Adding to Vine's unease is Aaron's growing obsession with her, a fixation so overpowering that it leads him to marry a woman named Aidia whose resemblance to Vine is eerie. Aaron's brooding desperation for Vine culminates in one frightful night that unequivocally changes Vine's life forever and leads to the theme that is central to House's novel: forgiveness.
A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES, while somewhat light on plot, is nevertheless a vibrant novel. House is a master storyteller; his prose is forthright and gentle, fierce and flowing. A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES is a doorway into another time and place: Appalachia in 1917, a time when technology battles with the old ways daily; a place relunctantly embracing the present while at the same time trying desperately to hold onto the past. House's characters thrum with life; his descriptions of the Kentucky mountains sing with beauty and nobility. In A PARCHMENT OF LEAVES, House takes readers into a lost world of proud, strong people, whose faith and capacity for forgiveness is severely tested over and over again. It is a haunting, lovely, old-fashioned little novel, and one definitely worth reading.
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