from April Reynolds Metropolitan Books.

from April Reynolds Metropolitan Books, September 2003 $2400 ISBN 0-805-07346-9

April Reynolds's first attempt novel, Knee-Deep in Wonder, outlines a young woman's search for the missing pieces that could help her demystify the confound of her family's history. Reynolds's treatment of this universal theme, the search for one's identity, is animal food and provocative. As she crosss through layers of truths and half-truths, the author reveals a circle of time of pain and longing that spans three generations of women

"In the fall of 1976" writes Reynolds, "Helene realized she was fence abouted by the old, the dead, and the dying." Helene had recured to Arkansas to bury her Aunt Annie b the woman who had raised her, further that trip would take her into a maze of memories and revelations that would the two slake her thirst to know and raise flat more questions.

While staying with her Uncle ed (Annie b's husband) to make arrangements for the funeral, Helene, plagued from the want for "mother be enamoured of deep and dark as a carpet," drives a tortuous way to visit her mother, Queen Ester from whom she has decided one time and for all to acquire answers. The one-day visit is the core of the story, as the pieces start falling into place based forward Helene's memories, Queen Ester's confessions, and her acknowledge observations.

Reynolds's use of imagery (the metaphor of twisted/overgrown paths that make it difficult to find one's way, for example) and descriptive detail not absented in original phrasing, such as, "Auntie b knew what was going in succession She smelled it ... soured jealousy and craziness cooking onward a stove," are very effective. Reynolds is a gifted storyteller, whose obvious be enamoured of for and skill with language make Knee-Deep in portent winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award for work-in-progress, a welcome freshman to the institute of fine literature.

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