Junebug - Softcover

McCoy, Maureen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0972898417 ISBN 13: 9780972898416

Publisher: Leapfrog Press, 2004

Synopsis

"I was raised zero-parent," says hormone-addled 17-year-old Junebug Host, "what the newspapers call it when your mother is in prison and the father was just a sperm."

Junebug has been visiting her mother in Ellisville Reformatory for Women ever since she was five years-old, when beauty queen Theresa Host calmly stepped out of their trailer with an axe and inexplicably bludgeoned a neighbor to death. But during the summer of Junebug's high school graduation--and the summer of her first wildly passionate affair--with a snake-smooth greaser 20 years her senior--Theresa reels in her oversexed daughter, and shatters her world, by suddenly announcing the motive she had kept to herself since the day of the murder: an act of vengeance for a crime in which Junebug was intimately involved. "I did it for you," she tells Junebug, who is thrown into a ferment of memory and guilt.

Set in the outsized landscape of far-western Nebraska, a nebulous region little known in contemporary fiction, and peopled by characters whose extreme individuality is exceeded only by their eccentricity--born again Fundamentalist snake charmers, housewives making ends meet with phone sex 900-number businesses, a 300-pound New Age priestess and the traveling meat salesman who worships her, as well as the all-female inmate population of the Ellisville Reformatory, Junebug is a novel with the intensity of the mother/daughter bond itself, with all its wildness, tragedy and depth.

About this title

About the Author

Maureen McCoy is the author of three previous novels, Divining Blood (1992), Summertime (1987), and Walking After Midnight (1985), all published by Simon & Schuster. She received her MFA from the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, and is a Professor of English at Cornell. Among her many awards are the James Michener Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Award and the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in Humanities, chosen by Toni Morrison.

From the Back Cover

?Junebug is a rare and special book, one of those mysterious and totally original inventions that summon attention because they are so unique. It is as American as the Great Plains, as poignant as Carson McCullers at her best, and imbued with the deeply affecting and poetical heart-song of its lonely and quirky narrator. Maureen McCoy writes like an angel, full of passion, musical cadence, and offbeat curious insights into the human soul. This novel is a deeply touching prayer for all the wild and beautiful misfits on earth . . . including you and me.? --John Nichols, Author of The Milagro Beanfield War

Edition details

• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0972898417
• ISBN 13: 9780972898416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216