posted at 10/19/09 - 05:37 PM
She-Rain Reviews:
From Actor/Writer/Director, Peter MacNicol -- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001493/
"I'm reading your beautiful novel, and if I may add to what you've undoubtedly heard, such gorgeous prose, such beautiful writing, such singing speech! So Southern in its music and perfect word choice. You write like no other living Southerner, certainly none that I know. Only among the dead can I find your forbearers -- somewhere between "A" for James Agee and "W" for Thomas Wolfe. It is so exquisitely sounded out on the page that oddly I find myself muttering certain passages out loud to myself -- common enough occurrence when I read poetry, but rarely prose. Bravo!!”
From Dr. Cheryl McClary, author of The Commitment Chronicles --
“Once in a great while something unflinchingly beautiful touches our lives and we are forever changed. Such is the gift of She-Rain, Michael Cogdill’s first novel. He weaves a masterpiece of woundedness, love, death, and redemption that breaks your heart as it mends your soul. Just as the mountains embrace the cool breath of the she-rain, the novel cradles you until the final word. A soon-to-be bestseller!” Cheryl McClary Ph.D., J.D., Professor, attorney, and author of The Commitment Chronicles: The Power of Staying Together. (National Library Book winner, 2007)
From John Jeter, author of The Plunder Room --
“Michael Cogdill has managed to do what few journalists have done before: Move with stylistic grace from the formulaic demands of television to poetic prose that shimmers through his debut novel. Some of us have taken more than a decade to break the enslaving bonds of journalism’s tried-and-true habits so that we might be able to write serviceable fiction. But many don’t get close to the mellifluous beauty the author here seems to pour out as effortlessly as crystal-clear moonshine. At the same time, Mr. Cogdill has retained his reporter’s keen eye and his sharp ear … that of an orchestra’s maestro (or, more accurately, the sub-decibel hearing of a blue-tick hound dog). On a vast and multilayered canvas, Mr. Cogdill takes us into the brutal lives of harrowingly real characters -- some we’ve seen in other places in other circumstances, wrought by other hands -- yet he carves them deeply into our souls so that we bleed with each of them in every aching step toward their redemption.”
From Ruta Fox, Writer, Editor, Entrepreneur (Creator of the AH Ring, made famous by Oprah) --
“Michael Cogdill is the heir to Pat Conroy. His feel for the nuances, ear for the language, and ability to vividly describe the beauty of rural North Carolina are astounding. His storytelling ability, his infectious characters, and his authentic Southern soul permeate this marvelous, monumental, and moving book.”
She-Rain synopsis:
A child living as prey to an opium-addicted father, drowning in a gene-pool of lowest expectations, feels shackled for life to the tobacco farms and cotton mill poverty of 1920's western North Carolina. Some of the only beauty he knows rises in the eyes of a girl, surviving times harder than his own. Emerging from their adolescent love, the narrative rises far out beyond that opening milieu of violence, ignorance, and language-literal religious fundamentalism. It branches toward likely the least expected figure ever in a Southern novel. Her mystery begging the question -- what might have been, had an African-American infant born of scandal been placed on the arms of one of the grandest American fortunes of the early 20th Century? Raised utterly cloistered in the clefts of Appalachia, steeped in her "adoptive" mother's Vassar education, classical piano, the refinements most mountain people considered as distant and alien as the stars. When that son of an opium addict happens upon her -- each in uniquely desperate times -- they set off the beginnings of seismic change to the worlds