Kate Vaiden

Kate Vaiden is 57 in 1984, has just been told she has cervical cancer, and sits down to write out her life, a life that turned on the son she abandoned forty years earlier and has not seen since. Price gives her the whole book in the first person, and her voice, plain, quick, folksy on the surface and deflecting by habit, is the reason to read it.

She was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1927. In 1938 her father shot her mother and then himself, and she went to live with her aunt Caroline and uncle Holt Porter in the small town of Macon, where the household helper Noony became her only friend. At twelve she began a love affair by the Roanoke River with a neighbor boy, Gaston Stegall; when the war came he enlisted and died in a Marine camp before he ever saw combat. At sixteen she went to Norfolk to live with her cousin Walter and his friend Douglas Lee, was sent to a Catholic school, and became pregnant by Douglas. On the way to a new life in Raleigh she left him sitting on the train at Macon station and went back to her aunt's, where her son Lee was born in 1944. The maternal feeling never came. She left the baby with Caroline and Holt, joined Douglas after all, and drove for a blind piano tuner named Whitfield Eller until Douglas, deep in debt, killed himself in Eller's bathroom. Eller proposed; she left him too. Decades in a library and a lawyer's office follow, and in 1984 her cousin Swift, in a nursing home, tells her that Lee is alive, well and abroad with the Navy.

Kirkus found the narration fluent as cold water and the prose of remarkable freshness and immediacy, and noticed that Price gives Kate meticulous attention rather than sympathy, with pain at a simmer just below the folksy surface. It is a fast book, just over 300 pages, and a hard one, a novel about a woman who keeps leaving. Best for readers who want a Southern voice without the sugar.