Spelling Mississippi
Marnie Woodrow
Cleo, a Canadian on holiday in New Orleans, is sitting alone in the French Quarter late one night, dreamily watching the river’s lazy progress. Suddenly, a woman clad in full evening dress, from rhinestone tiara to high heels, takes a running leap off the wharf into the Mississippi. Cleo watches, astonished, then turns and runs, mistakenly assuming the jumper is dead — a suicide.
But Madeline, it turns out, is not bent on suicide. She is irresistibly drawn to water, as is Cleo, who was conceived during the great flood in Florence in 1966. Perhaps it is this shared obsession with the murky depths that fuels Cleo’s determination to find Madeline. She pounds the quaint streets of New Orleans, city of cheap bourbon, rich turtle soup, the scent of magnolias and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Spelling Mississippi is filled with all the bristling energy of Fall on Your Knees. Told with great humour and affection, it is a seductive, liberating story about ties that bind and those that simply restrain, and a lesson not in spelling but forgiveness.
—
2002 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: In her debut novel, Spelling Mississippi, Marnie Woodrow (previously known for two short story collections) revels in the ambience of New Orleans, so much that her setting almost becomes another character. Cleo is a young Canadian tourist exploring the French Quarter and struggling with her own past when she witnesses a glamorous woman jump off a pier into the Mississippi River. Convinced it’s a suicide, Cleo panics and flees. Later, though, when she discovers the mystery woman, Madeline, actually swam across the river–twice–an obsession is born. After some convoluted amateur sleuthing on Cleo’s part, the two meet and develop an intense friendship, sharing secret stories from their pasts, most of which seem to connect with water, and also sharing, just as quickly, Madeline’s bed.
Woodrow’s novel launches with lush language (‘Magnolia blossoms hung like little yellow corpses’), submerging the reader into the heart of the storied Southern city. But the narrative loses steam when it falls into a talky romance: the central action flounders as Cleo and Madeline trade tales and revelations. Eventually it drowns in too many overdrawn and overwrought episodes and feels 100 pages too long. Still, much of Woodrow’s writing has merit, and her contribution of a lesbian romance to the rich literary history of New Orleans is worth the raising of a glass or two of bourbon. –Nigel Hunt
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Details
| ISBN | 676974317 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Publication Date | 12-Mar-02 |
| Publisher | Knopf Canada |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 400 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| BookID | 12281 |
