Rattlebone

by Maxine Clair Narrated by Adrienne Hailey

Overview

Too long unavailable, this luminous classic of small-town life in the segregated 1950s has "magic dust sprinkled over each and every page" (Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review).

Irene Wilson knows that a “no-name invisible something” has settled over her parents' marriage and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In the town of Rattlebone, a small Black neighborhood of Kansas City, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair.

As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of neighbors whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own. Capturing an entire world through the eyes of its unforgettable heroine, Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Clair's debut short-story collection, 11 interlocked tales set in an African American outskirt of Kansas City, Kans., in the 1950s, launches her toward the front ranks of contemporary fiction. Of the several narrative voices, both first- and third-person, that tell of life in Rattlebone, Irene ``Reenie'' Wilson's occupies the passionate center, with well over half the stories related in her words, which evolve from a convincing childspeak vernacular to an engrossingly poetic prose that follows her coming-of-age amid the breakings and reshapings of her family and community, as well as of the unknown world around her. The opening story details the eight-year-old Reenie's experiences stemming from the first day of the school year. Awed by the new teacher, October Brown, and by local lore about the white mark (``a Devil's kiss'') on October's face, Reenie's fear turns to adoration and then to hate as she realizes the destruction that the woman has wrought upon the Wilson family. From the girl's suspicions about the spiritual ambitions of an itinerant white nun through various friendships and alliances, the accidental death of her first crush, her own near-death experience and, finally, her high school graduation, Reenie's lofty childhood motto, ``I am in this world, but not of it,'' aptly describes the inspired insight and strength that she comes to wield. Interspersed among Reenie's chronicle are equally intense stories about her father, James; rooming-house owners Thomas and Lydia Pemberton; Irene's mother, Pearlean; and the growing up of Irene's neighbor, playmate and competitor, Wanda. These and Reenie's own tales add up to an utterly addictive collection by a writer to watch. (June)

School Library Journal

YA-Set in the black Kansas City of the 1950s, these interconnected short stories engulf readers in lyrical language, poignant events, and vibrant characters as they tell the troubles and triumphs of Reenie Wilson's coming of age. Reenie and the other townsfolk work their way into readers' hearts via Clair's wonderful writing, making life in Rattlebone a touching reality. YAs will share Reenie's growing pains; smile at parochial, small-town folk and their idiosyncracies; and broaden their sense of history and bias. A treasure for all libraries.-Jessica Lahr, Edison High School, Fairfax County, VA

Terry McMillan

Strong, melodic, and honest . . . We need stories like this to replenish us.

Howard Norman

This brilliant debut belongs on the same shelf as V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John . . . Rattlebone is enchanting, sexy, wise, and richly imagined.

Ann Patchett

"I read Rattlebone when it was first published in 1994. I loved it then, and all these years later I love it more. Now I understand how rare it is to find a book that contains such indelible characters, and such enormity of heart. Welcome back, Rattlebone, may you get all the love and attention you have long deserved."

The New York Times Book Review - Veronica Chambers

Each skillful plot twist, each new, wonderful character has the effect of a sip of literary love potion. There is magic dust sprinkled over each and every page . . . Maxine Clair has offered us hope without rhetoric. She has told a story of struggle with a quietly triumphant end that says, sometimes, even in places called Rattlebone, black girls get to live happily ever after too.

The Guardian - Nick Duerden

"A small, perfectly formed classic . . . Clair is an exquisitely empathic writer, and imbues every page with poetry."

The Sewanee Review - Ralph Eubanks

Maxine Clair’s coming-of-age novel in stories, Rattlebone, is one of those books that deserves to be brought out of the shadows of African American literature and back into the spotlight it so rightly deserves . . . Anyone who reads Rattlebone will see its relationship with other important works of African American literature published in the same year, like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory or Alice Walker’s The Complete Stories . . . It is through Blackness that these writers also say something universal . . . to begin to see the Black experience not as “other” but as one with which any reader can seek to connect . . . [Clair] has written a book that will find a special place in the hearts of all who read it."

WASHINGTON POST - Michael Parker

Told in a style that is memorable for its ability to shift tones and to capture, in rich and controlled language, new levels of consciousness . . . Clair consistently attains the poetry organic to everyday speech while avoiding the quaint, the forced and the patronizing.

Library Journal

★ 11/01/2022

In this book originally published in 1994, lyrical linked stories unfold in Rattlebone Hollow, Kansas City's historic Black quarter circa 1950, during the halting early days of school desegregation, centered around the coming of age of Irene "Reenie" Wilson, a young girl navigating the perplexing terrors and thrills of adolescence. Woven through Reenie's impressions, readers glimpse others in this close-knit community: the longings of her wayward father on the fateful night the levee breaks; her long-suffering mother's heartbroken musings; the wry calculations of a boarding house proprietress about her husband's infidelities; the poignant redemption of that husband, since widowed. Veering recklessly through these lives is Reenie's schoolteacher October Brown, a nearly mythic figure "no more careful than the sun is careful about coming up," and the heroine of Clair's subsequent novel October Suite. VERDICT Individually compelling and collectively masterful, these resonant stories are told in cadenced prose of a ravishing, unforced eloquence. Writing this brilliant and evocative deserves a place on any shelf.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174884281
Publisher:	McNally Editions
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Contents

October Brown
Lemonade
Water Seeks Its Own Level
Cherry Bomb
The Roomers
A Most Serene Girl
The Great War
Secret Love
The Creation
A Sunday Kind of Love
The Last Day of School

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