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5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant, harrowing and haunting tale of domestic violence, Sep 20 2001
Leslie Wells' debut novel, "The Curing Season," may be one of the most upsetting and important books you will ever read. Brilliantly conceived, this harrowing novel flays the reader's sensibilities as it unblinkingly reveals the hellish and horrific nature of domestic abuse in grim, evocative and devastating detail. Embedded in this vital book are lessons on endurance, wrenching avowals of the depth of love a mother has for a child and stirring portraits of heroic risks friends quietly, but unhesitatingly, take for each other. Written with feminist sensitivity and a sense of outrage against violence against women, "The Curing Season" will surely be recognized as a classic in its genre, favorably compared with Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina."Haunting contemporary questions permeate the novel, set in rural Virginia some fifty years ago. Where can abused and battered women turn when "the right to hit your woman is sacred...right up there with the liberty to clobber your kids"? How can an individual woman, beaten into submission and gradually losing hope, solve an equation where shame, fear and remorse equal degradation? Under what circumstances can one woman, watching her life crumble away and her personality dissolve, gain the strength of reclaim her identity? One of the truly noble qualities of "The Curing Season" is its introduction of its protagonist, Cora Slaughter Melville, one of the more remarkable characters in recent American literature. Wells invests Cora with extraordinary resolve and indominable dignity, attributes upon which she must call to overcome circumstances which would conmpel others to consideration of suicide. Born into rural poverty, afflicted physically with a clubfoot and spiritually with an abusive alcoholic father, Cora Slaughter has learned both to accept her life's circumstances and to identify with the sufferings of others. This empathy encompasses all beings who have unfairly suffered or who are marginalized by a society reeking with prejudice and ignorance. She forgives her mother's passivity and receives solace from her wise and strong older sister, Sibby. "The Curing Season" dissects the cycle of domestic violence through the events which befall Cora. Her physical deformity, a clubfoot "like a glutted sluggish earthworm curled in upon itself," becomes a terrifying metaphor for the stunted, blasted life opening up before her during her late teen years. A drifter's overtures appear heaven-sent, truly miraculous. Cora's eventual debasement shimmers in intensity between physical and psychological ruin. In her review of the novel, Nikki Giovanni tells readers that "The Curing Season" reminds us about the necessity of standing up to evil. It is this lesson that Leslie Wells enshrines in her novel. Cora Slaughter's condition -- a beaten, devastated woman -- is all the more hurtful because it did not occur in a vacuum. The evil of domestic violence was accepted and ritualized by too many men in her time; her victimization did not elicit outcries of conscience on her behalf. It was on the shoulders of Cora Slaughter, alone, on which the weight of evil rested. Leslie Wells' desperately moving novel implores all of us to gain the vision, dignity and courage to denounce social evil and eliminate it from our midst.
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