Reviews

A strong narrative line...graceful, wry writing...richly atmospheric. ("Publishers Weekly") A strong new talent...vital and vivid. (Elizabeth Spencer)

"Not only does Scott Elliott write gorgeous sentences one after the next, he understands these people and this place."

First novelist Elliott explores the struggles of the Old South and the New South through the family of Tobia Caldwell, descendant of Civil War leaders and inheritor of the old family home. Tobia is haunted by an incident from his childhood, when a slightly older bully who had moved into the housing development encroaching on his ancestral land dies after seven-year-old Tobia tricks him into putting his hand deep into the creek where he knows a cottonmouth lives. The dead boy's twin sister becomes a lifelong fixation, as lasting as the community's belief that Tobia knows more about the incident than he is telling. Business successes allow Tobia to repurchase family land and begin demolishing the new houses, but the weight of the past never lifts in this somewhat breathless and heavyhanded tale.-Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

A strong narrative line...graceful, wry writing...richly atmospheric. ("Publishers Weekly") A strong new talent...vital and vivid. (Elizabeth Spencer)
"Not only does Scott Elliott write gorgeous sentences one after the next, he understands these people and this place."