Motherless Children Review
Motherless Children Feature
Publishers Weekly Review:
The decline of a grand Southern family—the Southworths of the Mississippi Delta— forms the backdrop of a rich, complicated mystery that succeeds at nearly every level. In August of 1946, Sam Swain, Chief of Police of Williams Point, investigates the murders of Adelia “Auntie” Southworth and her niece, Madeleine, both poisoned with arsenic in their morning tea.
The lurid, sensational plot unfolds over a hot, nervous week, but the author, in absolute control of the material, weaves a nearly fifty-year family saga into the narrative, brilliantly delineating the corroding nature of racism. The vivid language (“facts lay strewn like odd shoes on a bare floor”) elevates the story, and the solution to the mystery ends up both unexpected and satisfying. Most impressive, though, is investigator Swain’s emotional discovery that justice transcends both race and class.
Author's summary:
Williams Point is a Mississippi Delta cotton town. The land is black and fertile, the horizon cotton-white, and the humid air muffles dissonant insect harmonies. It’s the summer of 1946.
Sam Swain, the Chief of Police, believes that a community defines its people, and when the good and bad of Williams Point are known and balanced the result is something you can value. But when he investigates the double murder of two prominent whites—Adelia “Auntie” Southworth and her niece Madeleine Lott, both poisoned by arsenic—Swain learns that the truth can sound its own dissonances, and can leave you bereft of comfort and of innocence.
Auntie and Madeleine are murdered in their home, among family and friends who fear the truths that might have motivated their deaths. Information is withheld. But Swain slowly exposes the truth, and he finds it is to be feared. He discovers other crimes and transgressions—long past and recent—and his own complicity. When Swain finally uncovers the truth behind these murders he realizes he must choose between it and his community.
Set during a hot and humid week, "Motherless Children" traces the saga of the Southworth family through four generations, from its Delta frontier beginnings to its post-war demise. Auntie and Madeleine are both motherless children; both are divorced in their own ways from the community that shaped them, as is Swain himself. But where people must avert their eyes from others and the truth, everybody is a motherless child, and the danger people should fear wells from within.
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