Cover Image: Pale

Pale

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Member Reviews

Pale reads and feels like Mississippi - it is slow and rich like molasses, viscous as it slowly drips from a wooden spoon. Set in the 1960's, it focuses on life on a rural cotton plantation. Bernice, a young black woman abandoned by her husband, joins her brother working on a Mississippi cotton plantation. She finds herself in a tragic and unhappy milieu, surrounded by nothing but broken dreams, rampant deceit, and vicious vengeance.

Mr. Farmer's story line is secondary to the exploration of his characters' psychologies and motivations. An the author's imagery borders on poetic... you can almost feel the hot, humid stillness of the plantation. You can almost smell the magnolias.

This is a thought-provoking book that portrays a way of life that could easily have been set in the 1860's. The racism and traditional social order portrayed as occurring in the 1960's was surprising to me - that's more a comment on my own naivety, I am sure.

The real star of this book is the prose. Mr. Farmer paints with his words, and he paints slowly. He paints as slowly as one would imagine someone needing to escape Mississippi's sultry midday sweltering by simply sitting and sipping a sweet tea while retiring to the faint coolness of some shade. The subject and the storytelling style fit perfectly together.

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A web of secrets and lies bedevil a cotton plantation in South Carolina in the 1960s. Complex relationships among the owner and his wife and their servants create constant underlying tension. Narrated by Bernice, one of the servants, this debut novel does a decent job of tying this all together. The character of the “Missus” was somewhat overdrawn. On the other hand, Fletcher, a tormented biracial character, was very well drawn. 3.5 rounded up to 4.

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Pale is a sad story about three families living and working under one roof. Bernice and her brother Floyd work together along side Silva, the indoor do all house servant, while her sons - Jesse and Fletcher-work the cotton fields under Floyd’s tutelage. These two black families become ensnared in the web of misery spun by the house’s matriarch “the Missus” and her husband Mr. Kern. As the story goes on we become aware of Mr. Kerns indifference toward his beautiful yet spiteful wife, and the Missus’s heartache of the long ago loss of her only daughter. We soon find out that Fletcher is the “pale” son of Mr. Kern and the servant Silva, whom the Missus has made the target of her spite, setting out to make is life as miserable as she feels. The missus works a patient, yet potent, eventually successful plot to keep Silva and her family bound to the plantation and the Kerns forever.

I have to say that this story did drag on for quite sometime, so much so that when the revelations were revealed it was very anti-climactic. The author clearly has talent, theres no doubt about this but when every character has a sad story to tell which turns out to seem not a story at all it’s hard to keep turning the pages. I am grateful for the free copy received from Net Galley and look forward to Farmer’s future works.

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This is an engaging debut novel set in the summer of 1966 Mississippi. Bernice takes a job with a white family on the advice of her brother. The house is not a happy one, and the “Missus” is a petty, vindictive woman out for revenge on most anyone who looks at her wrong. Secrets, lies and betrayal run rampant within and outside of the house, between men and women who should by all accounts get along with one another. There was a constant tension running through the characters while reading, and I was expecting something very bad to happen. The bad was a series of minor events that became major ones. I have some difficulty describing the story; there were many characters, a lot of racism and winding threads that sometimes made it hard to follow. Nothing horrible happened, it’s more a cautionary tale of who do you trust, and to trust no one. There was so much back-stabbing and treachery it was a little depressing, albeit a fascinating look at human dynamics, and how different people thrown together under similar circumstances react and overreact. I was a bit confused by the timeline and setting; I thought this was a more likely scenario 10 years earlier or more. However, I grew up in GA, not MS. Overall it was an intriguing read, and I look forward to reading more from this author. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

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This book started off so beautifully, that I thought I'd be giving it five stars. Set in post-Jim Crow Mississippi, yet conditions were clearly dependent on one's race, unfortunately, I felt that the story dragged and went no where. However, it's clear this writer is talented and I look forward to reading his next book.

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