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First tagged "contemporary fiction" by Tina Lovell
Full Specification tags: contemporary fiction, literary fiction
Product Description
In 1976, on a day of his wife’s funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, during his father-in-law’s dairy plantation on a hinterland of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie asks for a small time to transparent his head, though thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again. What You Have Left is about a father and daughter perplexing to make their approach behind to one another opposite decades of longing, uncertainty, and ambivalence—all a while anticipating to learn that what they have left is value salvaging. Shot by with wily amusement and a meaningful magnetism for tellurian weakness, What You Have Left is a overwhelming entrance that explores a weight of history, a inlet of loss, and a probability of forgiveness.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #44846 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-06-05
- Released on: 2007-06-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
- Number of items: 1
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Loss and emancipation take core theatre in story author Allison's beautifully created entrance novel. When five-year-old Holly's mom dies unexpected in a summer of 1976, Holly's father, Wylie, leaves her in a caring of her grandfather, Cal, and disappears. Holly's coming-of-age on her grandfather's South Carolina dairy plantation is a violent one, producing a flighty lady with celebration and gambling problems. She does manage, however, to land a good father in Cal's contractor, Lyle, and a dual have a daughter. Meanwhile, Wylie drinks himself tighten to genocide and works peculiar jobs, while Cal endures a deaths of his mom and daughter with stoic dignity. But an Alzheimer's diagnosis proves too most to bear, withdrawal Cal to put his affairs in sequence before creation an early, still exit. It's some-more than 15 years after before Holly and Wylie reunite, providing a deeply felt romantic core of this aspiring novel. Characters' tension-fraught relations are good played, and Allison is skilful during navigating a labyrinthine web of psychological underpinnings. Though a structure has a stymied moments (chapters are chronologically confused and are told in several voices, account styles and tenses), a nonlinear account gives Allison a trove of angles, and he nails all of them. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a multiplication of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Allison's enchanting entrance dissects a shame and profanation embedded in a story of one South Carolina family. Shifting narrators describe a tale of 4 generations, commencement in 1991 when Holly is 20, struggling with a fact that her grandfather Cal is formulation to overdose rather than tumble plant to Alzheimer's. Cal lifted Holly after her mom Maddy died in an collision and her father Wylie disappeared, incompetent to cope with his grief. Allison flashes behind to a early years of Maddy and Wylie's marriage, when they dreamed of entering a NASCAR circuit, afterwards jumps to Holly's rather uneasy matrimony to Lyle after Cal dies. Eventually a aging Wylie becomes a anecdotist as grandfather to Holly and Lyle's daughter, and a contribution surrounding his successive disappearance and miss of communication over a years are seen by nonetheless another lens. Allison clearly empathizes with his characters' foibles and manages always to find some magnitude of amusement when they regularly let any other down. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Allison...has a present for storytelling. He sets his initial novel in South Carolina; his characters shift between mistakes and redemption." -- The Charlotte Observer
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
12 of 12 people found a following examination helpful.
By Richard Cumming
This tiny book (only 200 some pages) was crafted with care. You can tell that a author has sweated and suffered over each singular word. It's roughly perfect.
Allison's entrance novel serves notice of a new literary star among us. It's a story of a woman's hunt for her mislaid father. She's unequivocally looking for herself. Along a way, she rediscovers a mom that she can't reclaim, usually reconsider.
There are some strong excellent characters on a side though this book belongs to a daughter, Holly, and her dad, Wylie. The author has selected to occupy a cross-cutting of chapters that zooms behind and onward in time by a viewpoints of several characters.
It's a confidant tactic that unequivocally adds to a outcome of this supple, skilfully smart concoction. Fans of entrance of age epics, NASCAR, and South Carolina need to spin their friends on to this one.
I envision large things for Will Allison. Now, if he could usually write faster! Just kidding. The subsequent book will be good value a wait.
12 of 13 people found a following examination helpful.
By Kyle Minor
Holly's mom is dead. Holly is "sentenced to life on (her) grandfather's dairy farm" in South Carolina. Her father disappears. Then he's back.
Sound interesting? we haven't nonetheless told we about NASCAR, Alzheimer's disease, video poker, a Confederate dwindle . . .
And all that doesn't even criticism for a dauntless juxtapositions of time and impression offering by a novel's surprising structure, nor a well-made, superb denunciation of a telling, nor (most importantly) what new light Allison sheds on "the tellurian heart itself."
What You Have Left is a conspicuous entrance novel. we feel propitious to have found it.
4 of 4 people found a following examination helpful.
By Peter C. Dully Jr.
Having usually finished Will Allison's entrance What You Have Left, we was left with a feeling of detriment myself. A splinter of a novel, it went by all too quickly, and this adds to a thematic belt of a story, as detriment after detriment plays a approach by a consciousnesses of a well-wrought and contemplative characters. we suppose, on a good foot, a abruptness invites re-reading, though we consider I'll wait a bit so as not to dillute a tasty feeling of bewail left by a novel's initial reading.
The bewail tangible in a story is difficult by a supportive array of portrayals of what it's like to adore shop-worn and/or taken people--a feeling informed to any intensity reader (read: any human), during once permitted and wistfully distant. Mr. Allison knows his characters so good that even a many infrequent criticism or gesticulate adds to a summation of bewail that thatch together stories that take place over a camber of roughly forty years in South Carolina. While a characters are all members of a same family, some-more or less, it is a harm and detriment that binds them, not usually to their possess relatives, though some-more significantly, to a benefaction paths that enthuse their benefaction behaviors. The characters are outrageous though overstatement, and a poetry is so judicious as to hurt.
I'll be impatient, no doubt, watchful for Mr. Allison's second novel. As we finished a book, we was reminded of other debuts--McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Foer's Everything's Illuminated. The books are radically opposite in content, though they burst with a transparent pointing and guarantee of a proclamation of a vital talent. While McInerney's entrance seems antiquated now, we can't suppose Mr. Allison's will twenty or a hundred and twenty years from now. Do yourself a preference and review it; I'd gamble in retrospect, you'll feel as if we were during a Kingdome on May 29th, 1995. Except Allison goes 5 for five.
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