Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon
Ficton Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1-932961-24-0 / ISBN 13: 978-1-932961-24-9
6 x 9 / 320 Pages / $24.95 / November 2006
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
Summary
Young Tessa is a diminutive girl, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Midwestern community. Her father seems to believe in nothing beyond his crops, certainly not education for his misfit daughter. When a mysterious, entrancing librarian comes to town, full of fabulous stories, earthy wisdom and potions for the lovelorn, she takes Tessa under her wing, teaching her to read and to believe in herself—and a whole new magical world of possibilities opens up. But even as she blooms, Tessa’s father begins sexually abusing her. And her mentor carries a dark secret of her own that finally causes her to drown herself. Tessa runs off, following Mary’s footsteps, to join the circus as a trapeze artist, where she marries a loving man and finds a fulfilling life for herself amidst her new circus family. But she remains haunted by her past. And when a stranger from one of Mary’s fabulist tales shows up, Tessa risks everything to follow him to Rain Village, where she might finally discover her mentor’s tragic secret.
A brilliantly evocative debut set in the early part of the 20th century, steeped in emotional turbulence and down-to-earth wisdom, where a young woman must reconcile the inner traumas from her past and learn to live in the present in order to avoid becoming prisoner to her future. Rain Village casts a fabulous spell, pulling us into a world of mystery and possibility where love, friendship and loyalty might either destroy or set one free.
Praise
An April 2007 Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection and November 2006 Book Sense Pick!
“I am always thrilled to read a book that begins with dire circumstances and transforms into something as wonder-filled as the world of Oz. Carolyn Turgeon’s magical, mysterious tale will unfold before you and rise like the big tent of the greatest show on earth!” —Kathy L. Patrick, founder of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club
"I just finished Rain Village last night. Tessa’s struggles and then redemption kept me reading until the wee hours of the night – 2:34 am, to be exact. What an enthralling and magical book! The many themes and emotions of Rain Village make the book a slam dunk as a reading group favorite. The idea of a mentor and love of one person to change one life is a great discussion point that opens this book to personal experiences for the reading groups. If you get a chance, please say Bravo to Carolyn." —Barbara Mead, Reading Group Choices
“Carolyn Turgeon has written a captivating first novel that kept me reading Rain Village in one sitting. Her unique voice reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as she weaved her story of a remarkable young woman who finds her future in her friend’s past. Original and beautiful.” —Sally Brewster, Park Road Books (NC)
“Turgeon is the ringmaster of an epic tale of beauty and oddity in the astonishing tradition of Middlesex and Memoirs of a Geisha. Circ-lit at its most enthralling.” —Jennifer Belle, author of Going Down and High Maintenance
“Weaving together the inscrutable forces of memory, spirit, desire and regret and imbedding her narrative with a sense of the dream-like, Turgeon has written an exquisite, quite moving account of one girl’s search through history in an effort to fill the inscrutable holes that nothing else can reach.”—Curled Up with a Good Book
“Imagine a world where every fantastic story your best friend told you turns out to be true. Imagine knowing you’re a freak, but discovering later that you’re a star. Imagine a painful childhood, a mentor who shows you how to dream, and equips you to escape. Imagine running away to join the circus, and finding there the family you’ve longed for. Imagine these things, and you’ve imagined the world of Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon. A fairy tale in the best sense of that word, Rain Village is as magical as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, but grounded in this world. Mary gives Tessa a life, but cannot save her own in this lyrical story about knowing yourself and finding your place in the world.” —Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus is You Bookstore (IA)
“Turgeon’s quirky first novel explores the power of secrets and how happiness is found in searching for truth.” —BOOKLIST
“[V]ery accomplished…[a] beautiful dream-like tale… While Rain Village is author Carolyn Turgeon’s first novel, given the beautiful, redolent imagery, the taut, propelling story line, and the myriad levels on which the novel can be read and analyzed, there’s nothing to suggest Rain Village is not the work of a master…set to be a break through first novel which will be read and talked about for years to come.”—The Nougat Magazine (KY)
“The book highlights the power that librarians and books have to transform a life… Turgeon remembers what it’s like to be a child, often bewildered and entranced by magic or even simple kindness. And she writes it beautifully. She captures libraries’ ability to open up horizons, which must have been extraordinarily strong in the early 20th century, Turgeon’s chosen time frame, when reading and the circus coming to town were the only magic in many people’s lives… the book is satisfying and assured.”—The Durango Herald
Bio
Carolyn Turgeon studied English and Italian literature at Penn State and received a Master’s in Comparative Literature from UCLA. This is her first novel. She lives in New York.
Carolyn Turgeon's Website
Carolyn Turgeon's Blog
Q&A with Carolyn Turgeon
Unbridled Aloud featuring Carolyn Turgeon
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Excerpt
For a few moments she just sat next to me, stretching her tanned legs into the street, smoothing her skirt over her knees. I could only sit and stare. I watched her hands and her calves and thought how her skin seemed warm, like a blanket, or bread just out of the oven. When she turned to me and smiled, I felt like I’d been struck.
“What a perfect little girl you are,” she said. “Why are you sitting here alone?”
I stared at her. I could barely believe that she was sitting right there in front of me. Mary Finn, who was the closest thing to a movie star that Oakley had ever seen.
But she just rubbed her brown arms and stuck her hand in her hair the way other women stick combs.
“Did you know that stars die?” she said. “They burn themselves out and they fade from the sky, but they are like ghosts.”
I looked at her.
“There are no ghosts,” I said quickly, then felt my face grow as red as the radishes my parents bent over to pick each day.
“Oh, but there are,” she said, smiling at me with her crooked teeth, and lifting my right hand into her own. “You see this pinky right here? This little half-moon on the bottom of your pinky nail? It was once a star, you know, a star burning in the sky, but when it came time for the star to disappear, it just fell to the earth instead. Every part of your body—the moon on your pinky nail, the blue rim in the center of your eye—was once part of a star.”
Not even my own mother had been kind to me like this. I felt all lit-up and almost glowing imagining my body spread across the night sky like an explosion, sparkling down to the half-moons on my fingernails.
“And so the stars come back to haunt us,” she said, “the way everything else does, sooner or later.”