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The life of a Southern family
from the age of Reconstruction through the Great Depression—a
brilliant social novel in the tradition of Julia Glass and
Alice Munro
In the Hope of Rising Again, Helen Scully's elegant and
accomplished first novel, is the story of the Riants and
the Morrows-and the wealth of household help and extended
family that make up their circle. As such it is history told
through one family's fate: the story of the South as it rose
slowly, unsteadily, from the ruins of the Civil War and stuttered
into the twentieth century and the age of speculation and
boom.
Regina Morrow is the center of this tale. The daughter of
a Confederate veteran, Colonel Riant, a doting father and
noble-minded autodidact, and the emotionally remote Mother
Riant, Regina grows up in Mobile, Alabama, at the turn of
the last century. Colonel Riant has amassed a fortune as
a newspaperman and thus has control over much of Mobile;
Mother Riant, meanwhile, has control over the household,
ruling with an icy remove and an unyielding sense of propriety.
Regina's four brothers function with so little distinction
that few can tell them apart; their recklessly self-regarding
devotions extend only to personal grooming, profuse gambling,
and simultaneously courting the same women.
An adored, favorite child molded by her father's beliefs,
Regina breaks away from the Riant house and marries Charles
Morrow, an eager yet fragile entrepreneur. It is a marriage
beset from the start by Charles's instability and nearly
undone by the death of a child. Regina must hold her own
as her family meets financial ruin during the Depression,
Mother Riant descends into deafness and senility, her brothers
engage in increasingly mysterious habits, and the family
struggles to reconcile itself with the Catholic faith painted
thickly over its every act.
Scully portrays her characters with the full weight of humanity,
in sentences that are softly astonishing. Filled with incisive
reflections on death, love, atonement, friendship, race,
and, most of all, family, In the Hope of Rising Again is
a stunning debut of a writer of great insight and imagination.
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