Maud's Line

May 1, 2015
In rural Oklahoma in 1928, years after losing her mother, 18-year-old Maud Nail keeps her small household afloat while her father is off carousing, even as she falls in love and yearns to escape the narrow confines of her existence. As the novel opens, Maud is forced to shoot the family's cow, which has been axed in the back by a vengeful neighbor, as her sensitive brother is not up to the task. Maud is a smart, sensible, and plucky heroine of mixed white and Cherokee heritage who reads all the books she can get her hands on. While her father is on the lam and her brother is ill, she enters into a romance with Booker Wakefield, a courtly and kind white traveling salesman. Though she pines for his return when he leaves town unexpectedly, she falls back into a flirtation and then a relationship with a local boy. Maud is refreshingly open and honest about her own sexuality though conscious of her place as a woman in a sexist society, always careful not to insult the intelligence or manhood of her male friends and relations. Verble writes in a simple style that matches the hardscrabble setting and plainspoken characters. However, the book's conceit of having Maud wait several days to read a letter from Booker explaining his absence, as she's afraid to discover its contents, and then having the letter blow out of her hands and get soaked by the rain so it becomes unreadable, seems like an unnecessarily contrived plot device out of keeping with the otherwise straightforward storytelling. Verble, herself a member of the Cherokee Nation, tells a compelling story peopled with flawed yet sympathetic characters, sharing insights into Cherokee society on the parcels of land allotted to them after the Trail of Tears.

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May 15, 2015
Oklahoma, 1928. A Cherokee, 18-year-old Maud feels being an Indian was a misfortune more than anything else. Accordingly, she dreams of leaving the loneliness and boredom of the farm for life in the city, for a house with electricity and indoor plumbing, for pretty clothes, parties, shiny cars, and dancing on tables in nightclubs the life, in short, that she has read about in The Great Gatsby. When she meets Booker, a dapper peddler and former schoolteacher, she falls in love with him, and it seems her dream may come true. But then a double murder compromises their relationship, and Booker leaves. Will he ever return, or will Maud remain bereft? First novelist Verble, herself an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, does a beautiful job of limning a sometimes hardscrabble Indian life that nevertheless has the comfort that familiarity and extended family bring. Place is especially important to the author's story, and its setting is beautifully realized, as are the characters who populate this gentle novel with its sometimes slow but deliberate pace. Pair this one with novels by Louise Erdrich.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)