Messenger of Magnolia Street » (Bargain)

River Jordan is a storyteller of the southern variety and spent ten years as a playwright with the Loblolly Theatre group. She now teaches and speaks on "The Power of Story" around the country. She is currently completing a new work of fiction and a collection of essays.

Twelve years have passed since Nehemiah Trust left his hometown of Shibboleth, Alabama. Now a successful aide in Washington DC, Nehemiah is shocked when his brother Billy and high-school girlfriend Trice show up on his doorstep warning that something is stealing the life of what should be their idyllic hometown. Billy and Trice are convinced that only Nehemiah can help. As the three friends join together to save the place they call home, they learn the solution may require a willingness to sacrifice everything.

Publishers Weekly

Jordan's Southern gothic debut transports readers to Shibboleth, Ala., a sleepy anytown of "cornbread and ladybugs"-and miracles of divine intervention-that is being sucked dry by a mysterious, sinister force. An omniscient, grandiloquent narrator called the Recorder tells the story of three childhood friends who are steered by God to redeem their town. The novel's protagonist and the town's beloved son, Nehemiah Trust, left Shibboleth for Washington, D.C., 12 years earlier for a career on Capitol Hill, but like his biblical namesake, he is "destined to save his city and his people." Nehemiah's childhood friend (and new romantic interest), Trice, is a woman gifted with eerily prescient visions, and along with Nehemiah's older brother Billy, heads to D.C. to fetch him home. "Something is trying to steal Shibboleth," she warns, perturbed by the town's curiously dry wells and a premonition of an empty future. Back home, time and the laws of nature bend as the past folds into the present, and the smell of sulfur increasingly suffuses the novel as the supernatural and spiritual battle heats up. Readers eager for an apocalyptic story about "the presence of evil and the power of good" may embrace this novel. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.