The Blossom Festival

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Overview

The Blossom Festival is a richly panoramic chronicle of rural life in the Santa Clara Valley during the decades before World War II. Against the lush backdrop of literally millions of fruit trees unfold the personal dramas of a fascinating cast of characters.

Young Harold Madison, taking a page from his own father's book, seduces and abandons Betsy Moreberg, whose tyrannical father, a successful home builder, packs her off to bear her illegitimate child at a distance. The boy, Peter, returns when his mother agrees to marry Steen Denisen, an ambitious immigrant who wants Betsy's father's business as well as Betsy. Steen seeks nothing better than to bulldoze thousands of fruit trees to make...

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Overview

The Blossom Festival is a richly panoramic chronicle of rural life in the Santa Clara Valley during the decades before World War II. Against the lush backdrop of literally millions of fruit trees unfold the personal dramas of a fascinating cast of characters.

Young Harold Madison, taking a page from his own father's book, seduces and abandons Betsy Moreberg, whose tyrannical father, a successful home builder, packs her off to bear her illegitimate child at a distance. The boy, Peter, returns when his mother agrees to marry Steen Denisen, an ambitious immigrant who wants Betsy's father's business as well as Betsy. Steen seeks nothing better than to bulldoze thousands of fruit trees to make way for new homes as little San Natoma becomes a bedroom community for San Jose, and the land-rich father of Olivia and Albin Roberts must sell prime orchards to keep his family afloat during the Depression.

Peter becomes fascinated with Olivia, who has always wanted to star in the annual Blossom Festival, the traditional spring pageant that heralds the new growing season. Olivia has befriended Fumiko Yamamoto, the nisei daughter of prosperous Japanese fruit growers. The rancorous politics of race and the palpable presence of the overseas war conspire to mar the Blossom Festival of 1940, however, and the friends will scatter. Fumiko's family to a Japanese relocation camp.

This wonderful and leisurely read is an honest rendering of the complex relationships between parents and children in the changing context of a rich region of California that is leaving behind its agricultural past to become Silicon Valley.

Editorial Reviews

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Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Published by the University of Nevada Press, The Blossom Festival, an original trade paperback, was a favorite of the Discover reading group for its poignant story of the encroaching change in California's Santa Clara Valley (now better known as Silicon Valley) between the two World Wars. Cherry, peach, and pear orchards were supplanted by urban development, and the annual Blossom Festival yielded to World War II. Rich in description of the farmers' and laborers' lives, redolent with the smells of the earth and the fruit on the trees, The Blossom Festival was chosen for this award from eighty-two titles published by Western presses.

The grandson of the last blacksmith in Saratoga, California, author Lawrence Coates "was drawn by those family stories about a place that was no longer there." Citing Willa Cather and William Faulkner as among his influences, Coates chose not to focus his novel on one particular character, instead making the land his protagonist. "To me," offers Coates, "the book is really the story of the local people's relationship to the land." A marvelous pageant of family drama, cultural upheaval, the impending Second World War, and struggles with racism and xenophobia, The Blossom Festival is a powerful, memorable first novel.

James D. Houston
Lawrence Coates' fondness for the orchard country of central California in the years before World War Two brings to mind John Steinbeck and William Saroyan. His novel emerges from that same world, the fertile fields, the crossroads culture, where immigrant families collide and intermingle as they strive to claim some piece of the legendary western terrain. The Blossom Festival is an old American story made new. Coates knows the soil of Santa Clara Valley, he knows its history, and his tale shines a haunting light on the world we all inhabit now.
More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews
Robert F. Gish
Lawrence Coates' The Blossom Festival is a poignant, between-World-Wars mapping of a more Edenic Santa Clara Valley in northern California when the mechanistic intrusions in the garden still whistled and honked of promise and progress, sang of youth and love and spring-harvest of family and festival.
Teresa Jordan
Lawrence Coates' debut novel is full of luminous moments and quiet, true epiphanies. The Blossom Festival introduces a writer you will want to follow.
Publishers Weekly
California's Santa Clara Valley has become known as Silicon Valley, a transformation that debut novelist Coates implicitly contrasts by setting his tale in the orchard-strewn, pastoral community during the years between the two world wars. The plot meanders across decades and weaves many family sagas together. Harold Madison was abandoned by his father as a child, and he in turn abandons his girlfriend, Betsy Moreberg, when she becomes pregnant. Betsy is forced to give up her son, Peter, but 11 years later reunites with him. Peter's story soon meshes with that of classmates Albin and Olivia Roberts, and with Fumiko Yamamoto, the nisei daughter of an immigrant Japanese family. Their lives colorfully described, these Valley-dwellers cherish their cherry and pear orchards, bake scrumptious homemade pies and don't "spare the rod" in child-rearing. The last few chapters depict the "blossom festival" of the title, as townsfolk gather for the event that was observed annually between 1900 and 1941. This celebration of spring--featuring sack races, children's pageants, pseudo-freak shows, barbecued rabbit and kite-flying contests--is destined to be one of the last, though the characters don't know that. Especially poignant are the scenes tracing Fumiko and her family's attempts to assimilate, as readers foresee the WWII internment camps that await them. Meanwhile, Coates describes the bigotry Fumiko suffers as her friends try to sneak her into the festival and protect her from racist thugs. Two tender love stories develop, between Fumiko and Albin and between Peter and Olivia, indicating the hope each spring brings. This quietly old-fashioned novel occasionally stumbles on its nostalgic reverie, but its essence is bittersweet: that even a paradisical land is marked by the human hopes and hatreds that reverberate long after the orchards are replaced by corporate parks. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780874173376
  • Publisher: University of Nevada Press
  • Publication date: 8/1/1999
  • Pages: 360
  • Series: Western Literature Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.60 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Read an Excerpt




Chapter One


The Last Game November 11, 1920


They played ball on a dirt field that sloped up toward the railroad embankment in right field and dropped off beyond left field into a ravine. They always called it the Southern Pacific Field, because the railroad owned it. None of them thought it had ever been called anything else. Leafless fruit trees marked the foul lines, but the boys could not have told if the field had once been an orchard before the railroad bought and cleared it. They didn't know if it had once served as wheat field for Yankee, or grazing land for Spaniard, or vineyard for Franciscan, or, in times past, a seed meadow where Ohlone women walked and gathered and greeted each clump of trees and each large rock by its true name. The boys played in the endless present of the game, hit and ran across a field created, they had no reason to doubt, especially for them.

    Harold Madison, the oldest and tallest of the players, watched a ball crack cleanly in the air toward him in left field. He circled in, the ball a high white mark in the dark sky, then knew in an instant he'd misjudged, It was over his head. He spun and ran with his back to the field, but he saw the ball land beyond him, bounce twice, and disappear into the ravine.

    "Damn," Harold swore automatically. He hung his glove on the foul-line tree and spidered down to find the ball. The sides of the ravine were slick and leaf-covered, and putty-colored trees curved in toward the creek at the bottom, and everywhere the air smelled wet and rotten.

    Then he stumbled over some rockand ash—a dead hobo fire—and he heard a noise.

    "You lost something? Or just lost."

    An old man with leaves tangled in his hair grinned at Harold from across the creek. He held the baseball up, and Harold saw that the man was missing three fingers. Stumps, dirt-grained as old carrots, played across the seams.

    Overhead, a freight train pounded slowly across the railroad bridge that leaped the ravine.

    "Can I have the ball back, mister?"

    "So, you did lose something," the man said. Harold figured that this was another crazy logger or teamster, left over from the lumbering days. The last redwood had been brought down the hill nine years earlier, when he was seven, and some men had never quite caught on anywhere else. They wandered through the prosperous valley like graying ghosts, and Harold had always been told to leave them be. They were dangerous, people said. Strays.

    "What did you lose?" The man's yellow teeth showed in his smile.

    "The baseball."

    "This baseball?"

    "Please, mister." Harold didn't want to get any closer to him.

    "Ho, ho, ho. Please!" He laughed, then threw the ball across the creek to Harold.

    "Thanks." Harold turned and scrambled up the hill, and he heard the old man behind him.

    "See you around, sport."

    The trees thinned and the sky grew lighter as he reached the edge of the ravine, and the air was colder and cleaner, without the damp rotting smell. He pushed off one last tree and clambered up to the playing field. The other boys were waiting for him.

    Paolo, the shortstop, waved for the ball.

    "Come on. Rain's coming."

    Harold signaled thumbs-up and threw in to Paolo, and their makeshift diamond grew alive again with game chatter. But Harold looked up to the sky, and he knew this would be the last day for baseball. Time was passing. After this holiday, the days would grow short and the rains would come frequently, turning the field to mud. This was Armistice Day, two years after the war, and he and the others, standing on the field under the gray sky, had decided to skip the flags and parade and speeches in San Jose and play one last time together.

    Now the old man had taken him away from the game. He looked back to the ravine, half afraid he would see him rising out of the leaves, rank and enormous. He saw there instead a picture from his memory, a day in October, some years past.

    From the yards a track switch clacked into place and a train whistle blew.

Table of Contents

1 Lone Hill
1 The Last Game 3
2 Southland 6
3 Lone Hill 24
4 The Well-Kept Home 32
5 Mrs. Madison 36
6 The Lye Shed 41
7 The Butterfly Skirt 52
8 Full-Time Man 59
9 Knock on the Door 74
10 The Last Game 86
11 Beat the Chinaman 95
2 The Coast Daylight
12 The Coast Daylight 107
13 Off Visiting Relatives 114
14 A View from the Tower 130
15 The Valley of Heart's Delight 138
16 Lone Hill 155
17 Gambit 163
18 The Forge 172
19 Poker 192
20 House Fire 200
21 Coal Oil 207
22 Shorty's Dream 213
23 New Deal 219
24 Steen's Dream 226
3 The Blossom Festival
25 The Year of the Rooster 233
26 The Fairy King 249
27 Cherry Rain 257
28 The Language of Birds 272
29 The White-Limbed Girls 281
30 The Blossom Festival 292
31 The World's Fair 325
Epilogue: To 1942 341
Acknowledgments 345

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