Hearts Sing, Crickets Cry in Christy Award Finalist's Novel of Hope
by Randall Murphree
July 3, 2006
(AgapePress) - - It's hard to know where to begin -- with the two heart-grabbing characters or with this author's pure, crisp wordsmithery. Let's begin with the latter:
"Below me the Tallulah River spread out seamlessly into Lake Burton in a sheet of translucent, unmoving green, untouched by the antique cutwaters and jet skis that would split her skin and roll her to shore at 7:01 A.M .... If God was down here drinking His coffee, then He was on the second cup, because He'd already Windexed the sky. Only the streaks remained."
And that's on the first page! Such easy eloquence flows from beginning to end.
Seven-year-old Annie Stephens is the gracious and gentle centerpiece of When Crickets Cry: A Novel of the Heart (WestBow, 2006). The winsome young sidewalk entrepreneur is a child whose life sings with love and hope and faith and -- well, with just plain heart. Ironically, Annie needs a new heart.
Annie's parents have died and her aunt Cici is her guardian. Annie sells lemonade to raise money for her heart transplant, but the prospects for a matching donor are nebulous at best.
Providing poignant counterpoint to Annie's song of hope are the despairing and discordant lyrics of the life of Reese Mitchell, a semi-reclusive resident of Lake Burton near the sleepy town of Clayton, Georgia. From the time he meets Annie at her lemonade stand in town, Reese wears a mantle of mystery wherever he goes.
We learn early that Reese carries with him an unopened letter from his late wife, who died of heart trouble a few years earlier. Reese narrates the tale and technically, the mystery man may be the story's protagonist, but Annie is still its heart.
The extroverted Annie and the secretive Reese would seem unlikely candidates to become close friends and confidants, yet the bad-heart connection creates between them a bond that neither can resist. In their comfortable dialogue, Reese often quotes grand lines from Shakespeare. Annie speaks simple truths of childlike hope and faith.
Reese teaches Annie what Shakespeare means. Annie teaches Reese what life means.
Christy Award Finalist
When Crickets Cry is the epitome of how a story can at one time, entertain the mind, engage the heart, challenge the spirit and instruct the conscience. Novelist Charles Martin came out of the chute strong in 2004 with The Dead Don't Dance, his debut novel, a finalist for a Christy Award for excellence in Christian fiction. He followed that with Wrapped in Rain in 2005, also a Christy finalist, winner to be announced this summer.
Link: http://www.christyawards.com/home.htm
In When Crickets Cry, Martin again proves himself a master at creating characters we can believe in, identify with, care about and cheer for. He gives us men, women and children who are not perfect, sometimes seriously flawed, yet still appealing and approachable. They remind us of Uncle Joe or cousin Thelma, or unpleasant old Mr. Tomkins next door. We love them anyway.
As well as he creates characters we know, Martin paints places we've been. Clayton is the kind of Southern town we recognize from having lived there or visited Grandma there. Or from having read about it in other great novels set in the South.
Yet, the beauty of Clayton is that it transcends region. For, as well as Martin does character and place, he treats timely themes with a clarity and creativity that few writers ever achieve. He brings theme to the forefront with strength, sincerity and subtlety.
Reese's personal demons -- failure, self-loathing and fear -- provide an apt context for Martin's theme of re-finding faith. There's really not much more to say. Except maybe that Martin is skillful at weaving into his storylines such issues as pornography, homosexuality and other moral dilemmas of our time. Yet, there's no preacher, no heavy-handed moralist, just ordinary people meeting life, tackling obstacles, growing stronger, finding hope.
Martin is masterful, magnificent in When Crickets Cry. The enigmatic Reese Mitchell would probably quote Shakespeare's Hamlet: "A rhapsody of words: heaven's face doth glow."
Makes us eager for Martin's next work. It's Maggie, sequel to The Dead Don't Dance, to be released by WestBow in September.
An interview with author Charles Martin will be posted on Wednesday, July 5
Randall Murphree, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is editor of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.
