Book Review: Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld

Title: Stranger Here Below
Author: Joyce Hinnefeld
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Publication Date: September 28, 2010
Hardcover: 288 pages
ISBN: 978-1609530044
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky’s Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers’ troubles. Poor and single, Maze’s mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth’s mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter.

The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Maze’s earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day.

Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love.

This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.

My Review:

Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld is a book that will have the reader pondering the greater implications of family long after the last word is read.  Hinnefeld creates a stunningly beautiful, sad and yet hopeful, story of the lives of three generations of women spanning the years 1862-1968, all interconnected in a non-linear manner throughout the novel.  The story opens up with Amazing Grace “Maze” Jansen meeting her roommate Mary Elizabeth Cox in their room at Berea College. Next the reader is present at the birth of Georginea in 1872, the focal point of this brilliant story of fractured lives, women stronger than they know, family ties and hidden secrets yearning to be freed.  Stranger Here Below is carefully crafted and vividly descriptive, possibly more so to me, since I have been to the places mentioned in the novel, nonetheless, Hinnefeld makes certain the reader feels connected be it with Cincinnati or Berea, Kentucky.  Hinnefeld blurs the lines of white and black and focuses on the women themselves and how they overcome or endear what life tosses each woman and how it impacts each successive generation.  Stranger Here Below is a novel that transports the reader, makes the reader wish there was more, yet gives the reader all that is required and commands the reader to think and take the lessons offered up through the many stories and extrapolate them into the reader’s life.  I cannot offer enough praise for Stranger Here Below and believe it is a novel all women should read and a book not to be missed by book discussion groups.

About the Author:

Joyce Hinnefeld is the Cohen Chair in English and Literature at Moravian in Bethlehem, Pa. She is the author of a short story collection, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (University Press of New England, 1998), which was awarded the 1997 Breadloaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction in 1997. Her first novel, In Hovering Flight, was a #1 Indie Next Pick.

I received a complimentary copy of Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld from Unbridled Books to review. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

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