She had taken the role of chair of the English department, an all-consuming job. Her agent had unsuccessfully shopped the book. "I kind of thought I was done," Reynolds, 53, said during a reading in March sponsored by the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. It's Reynolds' seventh novel, and her first in nine years. "Even a departmental assessment report - not a genre of writing I turn to for pleasure reading - has heart and soul when Sheri's the one writing it." "The novel's as vibrantly alive as everything Sheri writes, and I do mean everything," said John McManus, professor and director of the M.F.A. "The Tender Grave" goes far beyond the break-in to examine a hate crime, the poisons released in a dysfunctional family and the first meeting of stepsisters from different worlds. Reynolds next had to figure out: "How could somebody do such an unsympathetic thing and still be sympathetic?" In her imagination, the intruder took form as a 17-year-old girl. What would make somebody kick in an old, old lady's door and steal her pills?"
The first piece that inspired Reynolds' new novel, "The Tender Grave," came from her life.Ībout a decade ago, "someone kicked in my grandmother's door" while she was at the chiropractor, said Reynolds, who is chair of the English department in Old Dominion University's College of Arts and Letters. I have to figure out: Where does it lead and where does it come from?" Steeped in the rich Southern atmosphere for which Sheri Reynolds has long been hailed, Firefly Cloak is a vivid coming-of-age novel of family, loss, and redemption."I loved working on this book so much," Sheri Reynolds said of "The Tender Grave." "I reconnected with something in me that I had let go a little bit." By Philip Walzerįor Sheri Reynolds, "a novel emerges piece by piece. Seven years later, when word arrives that her mother has been spotted working at a tourist trap on a seaside boardwalk not far from where Tessa Lee lives, she sets off on a dangerous journey to try to recover what has been taken from her. This housecoat, painted with tiny fireflies, becomes totemic for Tessa Lee, providing a connection to her past and to the beautiful mother she lost. When eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her brother, Travis, are abandoned in a campground by their desperate mother and her boyfriend of the moment, they are left with only two things: a phone number written in Magic Marker on Travis’s back and their mother’s favorite housecoat, which she leaves wrapped around her sleeping children.
Firefly Cloak is the powerfully vivid coming-of-age story of Tessa Lee, who, after being abandoned by her mother, sets off on a risky journey to discover what she has lost.
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