What the Thunder Said: A Novella and Stories

By Janet Peery

Book Overview

What the Thunder Said is the 2008 winner of the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. ? In the Dust Bowl of 1930s Oklahoma, a family comes apart, as sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon keep secrets from their father, and from each other. Etta, the dangerously impulsive favorite of her father, longs for adventure someplace far away from the bleak and near-barren plains, and she doesn't care how she gets there; watchful Mackie keeps house and obeys the letter of her father's law, while harboring her own dreams. After the massive 1935 Black Sunday dust storm brings ruin to the family, the sisters' conflict threatens further damage.? Seeking escape, and wagering their futures on an Indian boarding school runaway named Audie Kipp, the two leave home to forge their own separate paths, each setting off in search of a new life, each finding a fate different than she expected. Through shifting perspectives, voices, and characters, What the Thunder Said tracks their wayward progress, following the sisters, their children, and those whose stories intersect with theirs as they range across the high plains of the West in the decades after the Great Depression.? Etta's hitchhiking encounter with a bookish couple in the Garden of the Gods; a prairie jackrabbit drive, during which Mackie's son, Jesse, discovers the cloth he's cut from; an old man's failing memory as he tells of spying on an Indian loner on the outskirts of a Kansas town; a middle-aged doctor's chance meeting with a mysterious wayfarer while on a quest to New Mexico in search of? his lost youth; and Mackie's late reconciliation with her aged father, whose habit of silence has bred her own---all are rendered in vivid prose that captures the plains and the people who endured devastation and lived to look back on it. Slow-gathering, powerful, with passages of haunting beauty, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed storytellers. ?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312252633
• ISBN13: 9780312252632
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Faith and Literature

For those who are looking for a spiritual context in very modern literature, Janet Peery's stories offer much to discuss. Her characters often arrive at a "moment of grace." There is a redemptive quality to many of the stories. Just how and when these special moments occur is an excellent topic for discussion, as is the question of whether they are intentionally spiritual or just an illustration that spiritual meaning is present in our world and can be found in the most ordinary and extraordinary occurrences.

A Plesant Surprise

I admit to buying this book in order to fulfill my $25 purchase in order to get free shipping. Imagine my delight when I couldn't wait to get back to the stories. There is one novella and then shorter stories that follow, but they are all about the members of the original family. I am sharing this book with friends and hope we can use it in our bookclub. I am So glad that I read this book and will look for other books by Janet Peery.

A Beautiful and Rewarding Read

This is one of the most interesting books I've read in years. I recommend it highly to anybody interested in good fiction--both avid readers and those who have let too much time slip by since their last read. Perfect pacing and control of revelation and suspense allow you to lose yourself in the delight of a good story. There's music in the language and complexity in the characters and the plot lines. As a bit of a history buff, I'm often let down by this sort of novel. I was astounded by the accuracy with which this book brings a historical world alive. The book is funny at times, and tragic, like our lives. The human relationships in the book are all so real I was often deeply shaken. Of all the book's many admirable qualities, though, what I would say was the most rewarding to me as a reader (and RE-READER) is the this book's innovative form. Like any great work of art, the form of this book honors our long literary tradition and renews, adds to, or deepens that very tradition through innovations so subtle and yet so fascinating that their meanings unravel only slowly--a strong brain-satisfaction lasted on long after I had finished reading. It's a collection of stories that intricately interconnect. The gaps make the world of the book enormous; the overlapping makes it real. Characters from earlier stories turn up later fully grown, with their lives already lived, so that what I take away is the most amazing twist of the Postmodern "fragmentation" theme yet to be written: diverging plots and wandering characters somehow converge again because our lives are not only hellish at times and lonely and hard but magnificent--and mysteriously whole.