Vorab-Rezensenten

Love in Tennessee is a fictional memoir of the author’s growing up in small town in East Tennessee. From earliest memory he dreams of the larger world outside, especially the glowing, beckoning lights of New York, but the lessons he learned, essentially in the varieties of love – its sorrows, dramas, and ennoblements – he learned in his long lost hometown. He felt the first stirrings of sexuality while crawling as a baby among the silken legs of women. He found out the intoxicating pleasure of exchanging views of hidden parts of the anatomy with a young neighborhood girl before either were six in his dilapidated backyard barn. In fact, the first chapter of the book, Secrets of the Barn, introduces much of the erotic that follows in the book. Subsequent chapters show others in the town coping with love and its complexities while the narrator’s journey continues. In this way, the patchwork narrative resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. The final part of the work, after a culmination of observations and first hand experiences, the narrator is hit with a thunderbolt when he finds his first true love. The inevitable ending of that adventure is preordained, but devastating and complete.