NOTCH BABY is an epic novel that tells the life story of Kit Dugger.
Her character's answer to the media hoopla, after the mystery of her child's forty-year-old kidnapping is solved, is to write her story down and hand it over to a reporter, so that she can carry on with her life.
Notch Baby is framed by the voice of present day Kit Dugger and told in first person, beginning with a killer hurricane that leaves her homeless and alone. It is this young southern woman's struggle with death and destruction that leaves her scarred both physcially and emotionally. Spanning thirty years from back woods Florida to South Alabama and back again this woman's indominable spirit urges the reader on from page one.
This is not simply a story of loss. But a saga of one woman's anger, and the courage just to go on living when her child vanishes. Her story speaks less of the loss of a child than a woman's will to find herself : more like The Color Purple than Deep End of the Ocean.
This epic story of unrequited love ends with a heightened intensity of drama that is revealed through both the character's emotion and the weather. We end as we began, in a hurricane, a torrid fit of emotion and the reflection of that emotion in the emodiment of weather.
The characters that pepper this novel are remarkable. The mothers--identical twins that perish in the hurricane, two mothers because she wasn't told which one was her natural parent. These white ghostlike figures haunt the girl her entire life.
The housekeeper, Claire Fatina, a quadroon, claiming to be Cajun and not no Nigra at all, with her mystical stories, teach the young girl lessons she won't fully understand until later in life.
Journeying through the inner workings of Kit’s mind are revealed the belief system of the era and an incredible sense of that time period.
The setting itself, a farm in rural Ocala in the thirties, the use of windmills inspire a lovely yet unsettling picture of poverty and natural power.
Revealed in her own words is the source of her troubled life. She simply sees the world from her view and hers alone. Even in the first chapter, the emphasis is not on the fact that she has closure to the mystery of her boy’s disappearance.
This is a character driven novel, yet the events that take place can carry an audience. From the massive hurricane to the fire that kills the Marys to, World War, to murder. This novel does not let up for a single page.
Look for "Notchbaby" by LaVerne Harvey in your bookstores soon.
LaVerne Harvey
