What the Critics Say
About Marilyn Coffey
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Great Plains Patchwork
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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 |
Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story
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The massive orphan train exodus whisked three-year-old Teresa from the safety of her New York orphanage, where the worst thing the Foundling nuns did was wash her curly black hair, to a desolate house and cold-hearted "parents" in Kansas. There she entered a small and strange Volga German world whose inhabitants spoke a language she had never heard. In this odd world, she encountered whippings and sexual abuse. Perhaps half a million children, like Teresa, were plucked from orphanages and shipped by rail (or "relocated") to nearly every state in the Union from 1854 to 1929. Mail-Order Kid looks at the orphan train movement through the eyes of one small child who yearns to know her "real" mother, survives a tortured childhood, and ultimately, as an adult, comes to terms with her past, her faith, and herself. — from the publisher |
Marcella
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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.
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