Idgie Says:This is a story filled with powerful words. It's a story filled with mysticism, magic and fear. The sense of place is strong. It's written a bit like a fable and yes, as the description states, smacks strongly of a Karen Russell (Swamplandia) style of writing.
A boy just wants to help his father get the medicine he needs and what starts as a simple errand for a prescription and a candy bar soon has him in a land he's unfamiliar with and in circumstances he may or may not be able to handle.
I highly recommend. Quite a good read.
______________________________________
Hardcover [$24.95]
(ISBN: 978-1-938235-11-5 )
Publication Date: May 2015
Hub City Press Minnow is an otherworldly story of a small boy who leaves his dying father’s bedside hunting a medicine for a mysterious illness. Sent by his mother to a local druggist in their seaside village, Minnow unexpectedly takes a dark and wondrous journey deep into the ancient Sea Islands, seeking the grave dust of a long-dead hoodoo man to buy him a cure. With only a half-feral dog at his side, Minnow’s odyssey is haunted at every turn by the agents of Sorry George, a witch doctor who once stirred up a fever that killed fifty-two men. Meanwhile, a tempest brews out at sea, threatening to bring untold devastation to the coastal way of life.
Minnow is a remarkable debut novel that evokes the fiction of Karen Russell and Matt Bell—a Lowcountry Heart of Darkness about the mysteries of childhood, the sacrifices we make to preserve our families, and the ghosts that linger in the Spanish moss of the South Carolina barrier islands.