Synopsis
The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, goes back a long way. Meredith Copeland's father, Albert, keeps a sort of written family record in some notebooks he bought to log the flights of his home-built floatplane, a project Albert first undertook in 1956, when his children were just kids. Now that the kids are grown -- Thatcher has a son of his own, Meredith and Mark are back from Vietnam, and Noralee is off dating hippies -- the notebooks are thick with the floatplane's failures to lift off and bulging with color Polaroids of the wisteria blossoms near the family plot, favorite family dogs, Thatcher and Bliss's wedding, records of Noralee's height and weight, a diagram of the graveyard, a newspaper story about wild-child Meredith's many backfired schemes. This novel travels back in time more than one hundred years, to the Copeland bride who first planted the wisteria by the back porch that would take over the surrounding woods, and then down to the present again to show how even though times change, people are pretty much the same.
Review
Warmly humorous, gossipy, and rich a book with the soul of a family reunion. New York Times Book Review"
. . . Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real. Los Angeles Times"
The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of [an] American classic. Atlanta Journal-Constitution"
Clyde Edgerton is a miner of considerable skills, burrowing into the hillside of humanity to find the ore of characters so pure and so real they might just sit down beside us and tell us a tale. Washington Post Book World"
A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph. . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed. Cincinnati Post"
"Warmly humorous, gossipy, and rich--a book with the soul of a family reunion."--New York Times Book Review
." . . Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real."--Los Angeles Times
"The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of [an] American classic."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Clyde Edgerton is a miner of considerable skills, burrowing into the hillside of humanity to find the ore of characters so pure and so real they might just sit down beside us and tell us a tale."--Washington Post Book World
"A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph. . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed."--Cincinnati Post
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