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East meets West in acclaimed author Gina B. Nahai's mesmerizing story of a journalist on a search for the truth about his father's death -- and his own past -- among the mystical, snake-handling Holy Rollers of Appalachia. When Adam Watkins, illegitimate son of ninety-year-old preacher Little Sam Jenkins, learns that his father has died from a snakebite and that a woman named Blue, a fellow handler, is being charged with murder, Adam abandons his assignment in Lebanon and goes home for the first time in twenty years. Almost immediately, he is drawn into a dark and exhilarating relationship with the purple-eyed beauty Blue. Carried to Appalachia from the mountains of Asia as the child bride of a languages professor, she is both outsider and enigma. Through Blue's and Adam's interwoven stories, Nahai brings to life a land of stunning beauty and heartrending poverty and explores both the triumph of passion over reason and the cross-cultural mysteries of faith.
How different is Iran from Appalachia? Iranian-born writer Nahai's first two novels, Cry of the Peacock and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, were set in her native land, to great effect and rave reviews. Now, in a thoughtfully executed third novel, Nahai takes on Appalachia, illuminating another region whose people are united by a fundamentalist faith, their beliefs as exotic to, and misunderstood by, most Western readers as those of the people of Iran. Foreign correspondent Adam Watkins is stationed in Lebanon when he receives news that Little Sam Jenkins, the father he barely knew, has died of snakebite. A snake-handling preacher who had survived nine decades of hard living and 446 snakebites, Sam finally succumbed to the venom of a snake given to him by Blue, a gorgeous Kurdish woman born in Iraq, and herself a skilled snake-handler who never fit in with the Holy Rollers. Adam, having tried for 18 years to create a new life for himself, returns home looking for answers: What drove Sam? And was Blue merely testing Sam's faith, or did she intend to kill him? A strong sense of geography and religious history provides the backdrop as Nahai explores the enigma of charisma, opening a window on an insular world and rendering the "other" America explicable. Alternating with Adam's story is the first-person account of Blue, her voice charged with the mythic, seductive power of a Scheherazade. Faith versus fanaticism, fear as a motivating force for seeking salvation these themes are examined, as events both tragic and redemptive unfold. This multifaceted work expands Nahai's fictional universe in new and curiously fitting directions. Agent, Barbara Lowenstein. (Nov. 1) Forecast: Moonlight onthe Avenue of Faith was a bestseller on the West Coast and has been translated into 16 languages. The Appalachia setting of Nahai's latest may startle her fans and lead to slow sales at first, but strong reviews should attract new readers. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Michael Plante
reviewed Sunday's Silence on July 30, 2009
Sunday's Silence
A bit of a disappointment. In Nahai's other novels that I've read she brought to life immensely interesting characters that I greatly enjoyed reading about. That was not the case in this novel, whose characters I felt estranged from and mostly uninterested in throughout.
The story is centered on Adam, the illegitimate child of an Appalachian snake handling preacher and a dirt poor mother. He is abandoned by both into an orphanage, and when he reaches adulthood he bitterly leaves his origins behind and becomes an international reporter. Much of the book is taken up with the backstory of Adam's family, drawing the brutal lives of his ancestors in coal mining Appalachia.
When Adam's father dies from a snake bite during a church service, Adam for some reason is compelled to abscond from his reporting post in Lebanon and return to Tennessee to angrily seek out who he thinks is his father's murderer. I had trouble accepting this basic premise to the story - that Adam, as described, someone who viewed human connections as a weakness and detested his childhood, would go to such lengths to return to "uncover the truth" of what happened when he accidentally learns of his absent father's death.
The woman who handed Adam's father the snake that killed him is called Blue, and she is of Kurdish Jewish origins. She is brought from Kurdistan to Tennessee to be the wife of a ghostly figure on the faculty of the University in Knoxville. Part of the book describes her family's life in the mountains of Iran and Iraq in a deeply tribal society. She and Adam have an instant attraction, both outsiders who've never felt as if they truly belonged where they are, despite all their efforts. In the end, Adam must decide whether he will save Blue from arrest and whether he can manage to place trust in another human being again.
Nahai's prose, as in her other novels, is really quite good. I like her a good deal as a writer. This particular story and these characters, unfortunately, I just never could find much imaginative sympathy with.
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