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Scully portrays her characters with the full wieght of humanity, in sentences that are softly astonishing. Filled with incisive reflections on death, love, atonement, freindship, race, and most of all, family.
In the Hope of Rising Again, Helen Scully's elegant and accomplished first novel, is the story of the Riants and the Morrows--and the wealth of household help and extended family that make up their circle. As such it is history told through one family's fate: the story of the South as it rose slowly, unsteadily, from the ruins of the Civil War and stuttered into the twentieth century and the age of speculation and boom. Regina Morrow is the center of this tale. The daughter of a Confederate veteran, Colonel Riant, a doting father and noble-minded autodidact, and the emotionally remote Mother Riant, Regina grows up in Mobile, Alabama, at the turn of the last century. Colonel Riant has amassed a fortune as a newspaperman and thus has control over much of Mobile; Mother Riant, meanwhile, has control over the household, ruling with an icy remove and an unyielding sense of propriety. read more
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