Inagehi

by Jack Cady

Overview

This Philip K. Dick Award nominee is a multi-layered novel: a murder-mystery, a classical tragedy, and a spiritual journey. Set among the Cherokee of North Carolina in the 1950s, Inagehi is the story of a young woman who inherits a mountain and the mystery of her father's death. With themes as ancient as the existence of God and as modern as post-traumatic stress disorder, Inagehi answers that voice inside us all that asks how "it" all fits together. A work of uncommon power from a master craftsman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933846934
Publisher:	Fairwood Press LLC
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d)

Editorial Reviews

There is little to recommend in Cady's slow yarn about a mountain defiled and the revenge it extracts on its owner. Trouble begins in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the 1950s when a 30-year-old Native American, Harriette Johnson, inherits 700 acres and ``dark knowledge'' about her father's murder. Though inagehi is a Cherokee term that means ``a person who lives alone in the wilderness,'' Hariette is joined in her newly claimed cabin by Johnny Whitcomb, who helps her unravel the mystery. Unfortunately, the mystery is as slack as an old guitar string, and by the time it's solved, readers are beyond caring. Cady, author of the well-received The Sons of Noah and Other Stories , inexplicably lets a minor character tell Harriette's story, thereby depriving it of real emotional logic and immediacy (her romance with Whitcomb, for example, is rendered as an afterthought). The result is a colorless heroine with a passion for playing music at odd moments. Cady's stiff, writerly descriptions don't help--``The walking stick flashed yellowly in the sun, descending, metrical, like a conductor's baton measuring the slow beat of a Bach chorale.'' And stilted dialogue is made more awkward by such editorial comments as: `` `Civilizations die for a number of reasons and one of those reasons was responsible for the destruction of the American Indian.' '' A (Joseph) Campbell soup mix of myth and legend that promises tension and doesn't deliver. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Set in North Carolina in 1957, Inagehi (Cherokee for a person living alone in the wilderness) presents the life of a young woman music teacher. Visiting the family lawyer after her mother's death, Harriette finds that she has inherited two things-wealth (700 acres of timberland and substantial money in savings and insurance) and a mystery. Seven years ago, Harriette believed that her father was killed in an accident; now she learns that he was murdered, executed by persons unknown. At the time of his death, the father had been clear-cutting the mountain, which in Cherokee terms indicates that he had already lost his soul. With the help of an unlikely group of friends (the white sheriff, her father's best friend, a retired history professor, and the old woman lived on the mountain), Harriette sets out to solve the murder and the larger mystery of why her father was acting as he was. Cady's novel should appeal to a wide range of readers. Let's hope the title won't cause them to leave it on the shelf.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.

Library Journal