The people in Ms. Peelle's fiction are fully imagined, but…It's animals that give her work its heartbeat…Ms. Peelle entertains in the novel in a folksy way that might lapse more frequently into hokey in a less confident writer's hands. She knows how to spin macho aphorisms in the way of westerns, making them feel both overheated and satisfying…The Midnight Cool …is…undergirded by the considerable agility and charm of [Peelle's] voice, and by her deeply attuned love of nature.
The New York Times - John Williams
10/17/2016
A drama about the speciousness of the American dream and the costs of self-invention…The novel resists trite resolution. We may write our own stories, it suggests, but we can’t predict our endings.” — New Yorker
“A poetic knitting of historical fiction and contemporary parable. . . . Peelle spins an American tale that explores the nature of love and tragedy, and the complicated connections between humans and animals.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Fully imagined…affecting…Billy’s longer and fuller life makes him the more vibrant of the two characters, but the mysteries of Charles’s fate propel the book…THE MIDNIGHT COOL is undergirded by the considerable agility and charm of Peelle’s voice, and by her deeply attuned love of nature.” — New York Times
“Peelle’s sad, swirling tale teems with grabby historical minutiae…Thankfully, the narrative’s multifarious hard-luck stories are also leavened with cunning flashes of humor.” — New York Times Book Review
“Peelle is a writer to watch. She deftly recounts the surprisingly fascinating history of mules, who bore the brunt of American labor during the period and whose resiliency and strength made them key players in the war effort, while also giving us a rich, satisfying novel, full of memorable characters grappling with love, loyalty, identity and the struggle to build something that lasts in a rapidly changing world.” — Bookpage
“Dazzling…THE MIDNIGHT COOL is a masterfully crafted novel of victory and defeat, longing, discovery and treachery, featuring a cast of characters portrayed with such depth as to become memorable long after we close the cover.” — Bookreporter.com
“I was taken in by every line in THE MIDNIGHT COOL. When I finished the last page I held the book tight for a moment and then flipped back to begin again. In this debut, Peelle uses her remarkable talent to remind the reader that we - all of us - are at the mercy of so many things beyond our control, and that life goes quickly, and that we only get one. I feel certain that only in Peelle’s hands could I feel as moved by the flicker of kinship between a horse and a mule as I did for the love between the human beings who live in these pages. This is a great story.” — Mary Beth Keane, author of FEVER and THE WALKING PEOPLE
“Dark and delightful and achingly authentic, this is an exquisite story of love, war, sex, death, and mules. They say mules have the best features of donkeys and horses, and the same is true of THE MIDNIGHT COOL—it’s both tough and athletic, smart and fast, vigorous and lithe. I couldn’t ask for a more beautiful book.” — Eleanor Henderson, author of TEN THOUSAND SAINTS
“Satisfying…[reads] like a cross between Faulkner’s ‘Spotted Horses’ and Fitzgerald’s ‘The Last of the Belles.’” — Publishers Weekly
“I was taken in by every line in THE MIDNIGHT COOL. When I finished the last page I held the book tight for a moment and then flipped back to begin again. In this debut, Peelle uses her remarkable talent to remind the reader that we - all of us - are at the mercy of so many things beyond our control, and that life goes quickly, and that we only get one. I feel certain that only in Peelle’s hands could I feel as moved by the flicker of kinship between a horse and a mule as I did for the love between the human beings who live in these pages. This is a great story.” — Kirkus
“Set in Tennessee in 1916, Lydia Peelle’s fiction debut is a wonderful tale of failure and success, striving and bootstrapping, and the ethical quandaries thereof in the United States a century ago…A wonderfully astute novel that observes human greed alongside the ineffable human desire for connection.” — Read It Forward
“Nobody writes about equines like Lydia Peelle, a prose stylist we already know to be tough, tender, and exact. In THE MIDNIGHT COOL she restores to the American South just before World War I the thousands upon thousands of mules who did the nation’s work at that time, especially the famous Tennessee mule, uncommonly intelligent, uncannily strong, often big and beautiful. Without reproductive futures, mules, like most of us, know they only live once, and nothing but luck determines whether life will be cruel or kind. Against the backdrop of millions of mules being shipped off to war, Peelle tells a human love story that charms, instructs, and makes us cry for the squandered lives of animals and men.” — Jaimy Gordon, author of LORD OF MISRULE, National Book Award Winner in Fiction
“THE MIDNIGHT COOL was written a hundred years after the events it describes, but it reads with the force and charisma of a writer describing her own time. It plunges you into the Tennessee of the 1910s, into the First World War, into high-stakes mule-trading, most affectingly into the ardors and errors of the people caught up in this extraordinary story. It makes you feel the urgency of every choice they make. The authority of Peelle’s prose is total.” — Salvatore Scibona, author of THE END
“Peelle is a masterful storyteller who has honed her craft with short stories and the collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. The Midnight Cool, her first novel, is rich with voice and in detail, the sense of place as familiar as her own backyard.” — Memphis Flyer
Peelle’s sad, swirling tale teems with grabby historical minutiae…Thankfully, the narrative’s multifarious hard-luck stories are also leavened with cunning flashes of humor.
New York Times Book Review
Peelle is a masterful storyteller who has honed her craft with short stories and the collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. The Midnight Cool, her first novel, is rich with voice and in detail, the sense of place as familiar as her own backyard.
A poetic knitting of historical fiction and contemporary parable. . . . Peelle spins an American tale that explores the nature of love and tragedy, and the complicated connections between humans and animals.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nobody writes about equines like Lydia Peelle, a prose stylist we already know to be tough, tender, and exact. In THE MIDNIGHT COOL she restores to the American South just before World War I the thousands upon thousands of mules who did the nation’s work at that time, especially the famous Tennessee mule, uncommonly intelligent, uncannily strong, often big and beautiful. Without reproductive futures, mules, like most of us, know they only live once, and nothing but luck determines whether life will be cruel or kind. Against the backdrop of millions of mules being shipped off to war, Peelle tells a human love story that charms, instructs, and makes us cry for the squandered lives of animals and men.
A drama about the speciousness of the American dream and the costs of self-invention…The novel resists trite resolution. We may write our own stories, it suggests, but we can’t predict our endings.
Dark and delightful and achingly authentic, this is an exquisite story of love, war, sex, death, and mules. They say mules have the best features of donkeys and horses, and the same is true of THE MIDNIGHT COOL—it’s both tough and athletic, smart and fast, vigorous and lithe. I couldn’t ask for a more beautiful book.
Fully imagined…affecting…Billy’s longer and fuller life makes him the more vibrant of the two characters, but the mysteries of Charles’s fate propel the book…THE MIDNIGHT COOL is undergirded by the considerable agility and charm of Peelle’s voice, and by her deeply attuned love of nature.
Peelle is a writer to watch. She deftly recounts the surprisingly fascinating history of mules, who bore the brunt of American labor during the period and whose resiliency and strength made them key players in the war effort, while also giving us a rich, satisfying novel, full of memorable characters grappling with love, loyalty, identity and the struggle to build something that lasts in a rapidly changing world.
Dazzling…THE MIDNIGHT COOL is a masterfully crafted novel of victory and defeat, longing, discovery and treachery, featuring a cast of characters portrayed with such depth as to become memorable long after we close the cover.
THE MIDNIGHT COOL was written a hundred years after the events it describes, but it reads with the force and charisma of a writer describing her own time. It plunges you into the Tennessee of the 1910s, into the First World War, into high-stakes mule-trading, most affectingly into the ardors and errors of the people caught up in this extraordinary story. It makes you feel the urgency of every choice they make. The authority of Peelle’s prose is total.
Set in Tennessee in 1916, Lydia Peelle’s fiction debut is a wonderful tale of failure and success, striving and bootstrapping, and the ethical quandaries thereof in the United States a century ago…A wonderfully astute novel that observes human greed alongside the ineffable human desire for connection.
I was taken in by every line in THE MIDNIGHT COOL. When I finished the last page I held the book tight for a moment and then flipped back to begin again. In this debut, Peelle uses her remarkable talent to remind the reader that we - all of us - are at the mercy of so many things beyond our control, and that life goes quickly, and that we only get one. I feel certain that only in Peelle’s hands could I feel as moved by the flicker of kinship between a horse and a mule as I did for the love between the human beings who live in these pages. This is a great story.
THE MIDNIGHT COOL is the miraculous, rare novel that is as compulsively readable as it is beautifully written. Peelle’s prose is elegant yet muscled, resonant yet swift, which is to say it’s wholly satisfying in a way that few contemporary novels are. The story of the kind-hearted horsemen/con-artists Charles and Billy is the story of innocence lost in the face of war, of love gained and lost, and the yearnings we face when we strike out into the territories to discover the future by uncovering the past. This book marks the beginning of Lydia Peelle’s career as a novelist, a career that will be long and celebrated, and, if THE MIDNIGHT COOL is any kind of signifier, filled with works of incredible power and grace.
A richly textured first novel…The skillfully crafted characters are rendered with acute psychological insight into the moral dilemmas that shape one’s humanity and sense of right and wrong. The propulsive narrative, fueled by poetic prose, is made more powerful by the heart-wrenching, quietly heroic lives eked out in the margins of history. For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Ron Rash.
The story of two horse traders swindling their way around early 1900s Tennessee becomes an engrossing audiobook, thanks to the narration talents of Don Hagen. Sometimes gruff and other times sweetly humorous, Hagen's tone captures the time period with universal appeal. He chooses to take a subtle approach to various characters' voices, and his skill with transitions and variations is such that the listener can easily follow along. When protagonists Charles and Billy find themselves the unfortunate owners of a vicious black horse, they make personal and professional choices that promise, or threaten, to change their lives forever. Reminiscent of the work of Larry McMurtry and Larry Watson, this audiobook has the power to transport the listener to an earlier America. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2016-10-19
