Oxford Stroud's To Yield a Dream is a novel richly suffused with the aura of myth. On the realistic level it is the story of the maturing of its hero, Jody, who in the end discovers love and the confident manhood that prepares him to depart Hurricane Island (symbolically named) for the mainland where his destiny lies. This preparation furnishes the substance of the story, in which Jody is initiated into the enduring and entangled mysteries of love, death, art, and time. These mysteries are played out through many, and basically mythic, characters that inhabit his youthful world. There are wonders along the way, rhetorical and otherwise. There is Johnny Revelation, the exotic evangelist, whose fantastic fictional rendering demonstrates the spectacular, indeed all but outrageous, eloquence of the author. And there is Jo Anne, the young and greatly gifted painter, whose work, as described, produces what seem to this writer strikingly original insights into the painter's art. Indeed, "original" is the precise word to describe this complex and deeply imaginative novel. But I would add the neologism "Stroudian" for those familiar with the author's earlier work.
Wise, funny, and utterly original, Marbles is the story of a who grows up in rural Alabama in the 1930s. He learns about life from a unique group of characters, including his zealous aunt (who is the town lush), his racy uncle (a WWI pilot), his best friend (a math and music whiz), and his first sweetheart, the minister's vestal daughter (who turns out to be anything but).
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