MAUD'S LINE by Margart Verble - Life of a young Cherokee woman in 1920s Oklahoma #Pulitzer Click To Tweet
Maud pulled a rocker to the side of his bed. She sat down, glad to have a moment of quiet. She felt exhausted. “How’re you doing?”
“Not too good.” Lovely dropped his arm and slid his feet to the bottom of his cot. “Does mama ever come visit you?”
Maud shook her head. “I wish she did.”
“She came to visit me. I saw her clear as that woman there on the wall.” He pointed to a calendar blonde holding a soft drink and smiling.
“That’s nice, Lovely. I hope she looked as happy.”
“You don’t understand, Maud. I really saw her. She was as real as you are.”
Maud didn’t know what to say. She patted his shoulder.
“Honest, Maud.”
“Mama loved you, Lovely. If she knew you were sick, she’d be concerned.”
“I think they’re here, Maud.”
“Who?”
“All of them.”
“All of who?”
“You know. Mama, Grandma. That baby Mama lost.”
“Grandma died when we were little. I can barely remember her.”
“I hear them talking. There’s other people around. Some of them aren’t friendly.”
Dialogue was the best part of this book for me. There are long passages of telling the story, which I found surprisingly pleasant. They bring you into the place and time and into the events. But dialogues bring the story to life. I loved the way they sounded, natural and regional, I loved the interaction between characters which became particularly strong in dialogues.
I’ve always thought dialogue is the blood of any stories. Margaret Verble really made them sparkle.
Margaret Verble will stop by my blog on her Maud’s Line Blog Tour next Wednesday 22nd July. If you liked this snippet, stay tuned!
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2 Comments
Carrie-Anne
That sounds like just the kind of book I’d enjoy. I love dialogue-rich stories, so long as the story isn’t just a bunch of talking heads the entire time. Dialogue reveals so much about characters and brings a story to life, more than a lot of long, flowery, descriptive passages about clothes, mansions, gardens, and pedigrees.
jazzfeathers
I wouldn’t say the novel is rich in dialogue, although I would say the dialogues are rich 😉
In fact, this is a story with long passages of what is technically ‘telling’, still I find that in this context and with this author’s style, it works surpsrisingly well. Then, intersparsed, you find bursts of dialogue that is really powerful.