Great Plains Patchwork
Copyright © 1989
by Marilyn Coffey
Iowa State UP
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The novelist Marilyn Coffey has put together an entertaining, insightful collection of
stories, combining fact and legend, about her beloved central plains between the
mid-1880's and the late 1950's. "Like a speck on the eastern horizon appears a wagon
loaded with Coffeys," who in 1885 migrated west to the Great Plains from Illinois. There
were 10 of them — great-grandfather James, his wife, Mary, their seven sons and a
daughter. The Coffey boys were a raucous bunch who liked a good joke, usually physical,
and would try anything once — great-uncle Ben even entered a "bear-wrassling" contest
and won. Stories of the family are integrated with graphic firsthand descriptions by
survivors of the natural disasters that periodically struck the Plains — floods,
grasshopper infestations, tornadoes, man-made mischief on a grand scale. Ms Coffey offers
insights on what it is to grow up in Middle America. It "gives one a different perspective
on history than the typical Easterner has, an inside-out view." As a child, she "never
doubted for an instant" that she "was dead center in the middle of everything ... a world
narrowed by dust storms, bread lines, and Al Capone." — New York Times
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Marcella
Copyright © 1973
by Marilyn Coffey
Charterhouse
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Marcella Colby is thirteen; she lives in Kansas, and her country is at war with Germany
and Japan. But other wars go on closer to Kansas — Marcella's war with her mother
and father, and her war with her own body.
For Marcella discovers her body and the pleasure it can give her, but then she discovers
that what she is doing and cannot stop doing is a very great sin against God, whom she
loves very much — but not so much as the things she does at night in her bed.
In Marcella, a woman has written honestly and graphically for the first time about
the fears and feelings of a girl growing into young womanhood. Marcella is about the
terror at the first sight of blood flowing from one’s own body and the despair of knowing
that for the rest of one's life, a woman's body is not under her control. Marcella
is about the pride of blossoming into womanly curves and the chill of knowing that a
woman must protect herself from the urges of others and from her own strong drives.
Marcella is about the thrilling knowledge that a woman can give herself the most
extraordinary pleasure, side by side with the terror of knowing that what feels so right
to oneself is so horribly wrong in the eyes of society.
Marilyn Coffey's intense, finely fashioned novel is the story of Marcella Colby, who comes
of age in agony, whose struggle with her sexuality and her morality is a memorable and
gripping reading experience. But Marcella is also the story of all women who know
the exhilaration and fright that come with leaving dolls and blocks for the pleasures and
anguish of adult sexuality. — from the publisher
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What the Critics Say
