Connie May Fowler grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, until her
father died when she was only seven years old, leaving Connie, her
sister Deidre, and their mother Lee in near poverty.They moved to
Tampa, and as her mother struggled to make ends meet as a motel
bookkeeper and maid, Connie sought refuge in books: "I could be
transported from the awful circumstances of my life by simply
opening a book.And writing went hand in hand with reading.Writing
to me was a kind of salvation."
While Connie attended the University of Tampa on a full
scholarship, her mother, who had never really gotten over the loss
of her husband, started drinking heavily and eventually died of
cirrhosis.Connie, feeling lost, quit school and spent two years
traveling through the United States and Mexico.She returned to
Florida, where the provost of the University of Tampa spotted her
working as a waitress and persuaded her to return to the university
where she earned a B.A. in English.
Connie married Mika Fowler in 1987 and moved to Kansas, where she
enrolled in graduate school at the University of Kansas.A professor
there encouraged her to take a class in fiction writing."That
suggestion turned everything around for me.The fiction professor
treated me for the first time in my life as if I was truly a
writer.With her, everything coalesced.Fiction suddenly made sense
to me."Sugar Cage, Connie's critically acclaimed debut
novel, began as a short story written to fulfill a writing
assignment for a fiction workshop.It evolved into her graduate
thesis and eventually into a novel.Critical praise continued with
her next two novels, River of Hidden Dreams and Before
Women Had Wings."
A nine-year-old narrator whose voice is heavy with sorrow, but who learns truths about the heart, is the focus of Fowler's deeply moving, triumphant third novel. The reader, too, learns lessons about a child's love for her parents, even when that child is the helpless victim of their physical and emotional abuse. Avocet Jackson, called Bird, lives with her parents, Billy and Glory Marie, and her older sister, Phoebe, in a roach-infested Florida shack. When Billy, a frustrated country music singer who has squandered his talent in booze, commits suicide, a desperate Glory Marie takes the girls to the outskirts of Tampa, where they move into a dilapidated trailer. Terrorized by her mother's alcohol-fueled rages, Bird is further confused by the fire-and-brimstone strictures of the Bible, which she takes literally. She feels that Jesus and the devil are battling for control over her life, and when her mother becomes more violent and calls her "a fat, lazy, lying sack of shit," she concludes that Jesus has spurned her. Fowler brilliantly conveys a child's bewilderment when the sources that should provide succor‘parents and religion‘instead inspire fear. Her depictions of physical violence‘Glory Marie's beating at the hands of a man hired by her jealous husband, or her own brutal attacks on Bird and Phoebe‘spare no harrowing details. Fowler sweeps the narrative along with plangent, lyrical prose. Mixing the squalid details of Bird's life with the child's magical dreams of hope and healing, she has fulfilled the promise of her highly praised debut, Sugar Cage, and established herself as a writer of formidable talent. (May)
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