This made me happy…

Al Boss wrote a lovely review of Pungo Creek  - so good that it prompted my husband John to read my book …..finally. 

Thanks, Al!

I was swallowed up by Pungo Creek. I breathed in its cooling, brackish water and filled myself with it. I would have died like many others if it had been the actual water, but fortunately for me it was just the book.

Pungo Creek (the novel, not the North Carolina stream) climbs the family tree of the Foremans, following the lives of people whose tough existence has been bedeviled by poverty, alcoholism, violence, death, incest, and rape. It is a grim, gritty, and spellbinding tale.

Brenda Mantz is a powerful storyteller. Intellectually, I know I’ve never set foot anywhere near Pungo Creek, but my senses have experienced the smell of the wind coming across its water over the pines. The feel of the earth there on my bare feet still lingers. I can hear the voices of generations of the Foreman family blowing through the screens of the clapboard houses, the creak and splash of the oars in the rowboat on the water, fatback popping in the pan on the stove, and the Baptist minister calling out invocations toward a seemingly indifferent God. I have seen the furtive, telling looks on the people’s faces and can often taste the whiskey on their breath. Such is the potence of this evocative, tragic tale; the reader is drawn into the maelstrom and every sense becomes connected to the story.

I was stuck to the book from first sentence, which, granted, was the entire prologue and covered a couple of pages, but it hooked me and hauled me in as if I were just another fish in Pungo Creek. I was crushed, transcended, assailed, and defiant, totally engrossed by the characters while I read. If the novel had been longer my family might have had me locked up. If the story had been shorter I might have locked myself up and not come out until I could read more of it.