No Marble Angels

By Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Book Overview

Characters in No Marble Angels struggle to close distances between each other, distances of race, sex, age.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1504030338
• ISBN13: 9781504030335
• Release Date: March 2016
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

First-class, 5-star short stories

This is an excellent choice of stories to bring back into print (originally published in 1985). Joanne Leedom-Ackerman creates characters that are ripe with humanity, both flawed and sympathetic. In a few pages she opens the world of their lives and lets the reader enter and enjoy it. The first three stories are all centered on a young woman from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina who has recently graduated from college. They involve Shannon's need to truly find herself and break away from family ties, her desire to see how other people live, and her need to somehow make a difference in the world in 1968. In the first story, her aunt's housekeeper is involved in a stabbing. The way her family treats the woman upsets Shannon's old notion of family. She leaves Raleigh to tutor in a rough section of Baltimore, living in a small, one-room apartment in an old brownstone. In Baltimore she also meets an unusual freelance photographer who perhaps unintentionally helps her see who she really is. Other stories in the collection are not related to each other, but each has memorable individuals: a man who attends funerals to look for a new wife among the widows; a fifteen-year-old girl who wants to run off with a drifter in order to escape her small Texas town; and an unhappy boy who steals a wig and hangs it in a tree, are just a few of them. I enjoyed these stories very much. Armchair Interviews says: Excellent short stories with impact.