From Publishers Weekly
The last living member of his Martin family, the author attempts to reconcile the facts of his own life with the history of his ancestors in this lyrical, imaginative work. Most of Martin's relatives were farmers in the Midwest, "hard workers, but for the most part...uneducated." Because they left behind "no letters, no journals, nothing written in their own hands," Martin turns to court and county records, as well as to fiction, to re-create their past. The shifts between this fictionalized history and Martin's own fact-filled memoir may provoke some difficult transitions for his readers, but the beauty of his obviously heartfelt words makes up for this awkwardness. One of the most powerful sections in the book vividly juxtaposes a story about the day that great-great-great-grandfather Martin bought his only slave with the author's memories of the whippings he received from his own father. Martin's fictionalized writing doesn't match the skill he displays in his autobiography; he creates more nuanced portraits of the people he actually knew, while his fictional family portraits tend toward hagiography. His characters speak in vague language, especially the women in the romantic scenes; they also usually end up making noble choices, even when those choices are out of step with their times. As Martin himself shows in a chapter that describes how he lied to the police, his father and a judge to avoid a hearing for a car accident, even good people sometimes make bad choices, something few of his fictional ancestors ever do. Nonetheless, despite these minor faults, this ambitious work weaves together many strong, intriguing people, brought together by a skillful writer for a family reunion across time.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“[A lyrical, imaginative work. . . . [This ambitious work weaves together many strong, intriguing people, brought together by a skillful writer for a family reunion across time.”—Publishers Weekly
(Publishers Weekly )"A moving family history and cultural excavation."—The Virginia Quarterly Review
(The Virginia Quarterly Review )"Through white space, Martin guides readers through his tale of his family's past, as well as his own, in a captivating tale of love, heartbreak, and redemption."—Ashlee Clark, Ohioana Quarterly
(Ashlee Clark Ohioana Quarterly )
Book Description
Farmers and pragmatists, hardworking people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin’s ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from the birth certificates and gravestones that marked their comings and goings, they left little written record of their lives. So when Lee, the last living Martin, inherited his great-grandfather’s eighty acres and needed to know what had brought his family to this pass and this point, he had only the barest of public records—and the stirrings of his imagination—to connect him to his past, and to his beginnings. Turning Bones is the remarkable story brought to life by this collaboration of personal history and fiction. It is the moving account of a family’s migration over two hundred years and through six generations, imagined, reconstructed, and made to speak to the author, and to readers, of a lost world. A recovery of the missing, Turning Bones is also one man’s story of love and compromise as he separates himself from his family’s agrarian history, fully knowing by book’s end what such a journey has cost.
About the Author
Lee Martin is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Quakertown, From Our House, and The Least You Need to Know.
