Child to the Waters

All of the stories are wonderful, but the heart of the book some in the story "Revenge of the Great House". It's message is subtle, but honest. The other stories, character sketches and vignettes are worth every moment spent reading them. "Da", "Dave" "A Perfect Day for Tyger Fish" are gentle prose poems of lives worth the living and a lifestyle lost long ago. This wondrous collection of stories from South Carolina's Piedmont/Tyger River region is the perfect anti-dote to the overrated angst that passes as literature these days. BUY THIS BOOK!! And donate a copy to your library, your kids' school libraries...

I couldn't help it! This book will be with me the rest of my life! I plan to share its store of literary treasures with my children after they are born, knowing they'll love the stories as "young'uns," and appreciate the beauty, wisdom, and wit when they're older. If you are going to buy just one book this year to expand your universe, make it THIS one! Everyone who reads from it wants a copy for themselves, which I'll help with as I am able. This book and this book ALONE fully restored my pride in my Southern heritage, which seemed lost to years spent in other lands. The TV and other popular mediums have painted a rather unflattering picture of the South and her people, but this book shatters those mundane and (largely) unfounded stereotypes. This book took me back to the Piedmont of North Carolina, where parts of my childhood were spent in the company of some of the best people I have ever known. I can't say enough, so just BUY IT! BUY IT! BUY IT! If you have any interest in Southern heritage and culture, simply want to read inspired short fiction, or like a bit of wisdom in your stories, get Child to the Waters.

The folk tale is a hybrid creature, part history, part gossip, part flight of fancy. They almost always contain characters that tie them to the myths and legends of the past while their voice and themes are tied firmly to the present.James Everett Kibler has blended local stories of the South with a deft had at imagery to create a collection of stories that slip effortlessly into established folklore. Told in prose that is by turns lyrical, earthy and eldritch, his tales beg to be heard in the glow of a campfire on a warm summer night to the accompanying chants of crickets."Our storyteller," he writes in the Prelude, "has decreed that here, the rules that govern the modern mind, so rigidly shaped by reductive science, neither guide nor apply."Rather, the imagination is called to drift into places where the evidence of the senses is not always trustworthy and is certainly no advantage.Appropriately, he begins with a ghost story, based on a local legend heard in many places throughout the South: "The Night Her Portrait Sang." Then, as if aware of the need to keep at least one foot firmly planted on solid earth, he follows with two tales of family and the enduring power of love.Mr. Kibler's stories are meant to be savored, the taste of their imagery rolled over the tongue like the very best wine, their sweetness and bitterness equally appreciated because both are necessary. Filled as they are with laughter, tears, courage, desperation, fear and triumph, love is, in fact, the recurring theme. It is the root of both good and evil-love of man and woman, parent and child, love for the earth and one's heritage.This book is a delightful experience that, for sheer reading pleasure, is not to be missed.

This book, a collection of short fictions, sings. Because the tales are not short stories with well developed characters and plot development and because they are truly lyrical, Child to the Waters should be described as prose poetry. And it works; the volume's language, including allusions, is rich and captivating. We need this language. As with the best lyric poems, though there is no traditional development, the characters are real to us, speaking to our hearts, because they are grounded in truth.

Native South Carolinian and English professor James E. Kibler has written a collection of Southern short stories, tales, and legends that reveres the ancestral land, woods, and green glens in the Tyger River valley of Upcountry South Carolina. Kibler lives in the area in a restored plantation home. Several years ago he wrote a history of the environs in a well-received book entitled Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story. The settings of the stories combine Kibler's strong sense of place and family traditions by relating ballads, bits of Irish folklore, and anecdotes with a fresh narrative voice. The Celtic roots of the area, settled by Scots-Irish in the late 18th century, are well evidenced. Kibler quotes generously from the works of William Butler Yeats and gives several stories of Irish origin a Southern flair. There are simple images, too, of the Piedmont section of the American South. A log cabin with red clay yard. A corncob pipe. Small family graveyards in the woods with "crooked crosses and fieldstones." River islands with haunting morning mists, hills of granite, and winding dirt roads. Many of the stories feature events of the past and specific landmarks and persons. The 1863 flood of the Broad River is one. The iron skeleton of the "whispering bridge" can still be seen as can be the ruins of Gordon's Old Bridge. The Appalachian song catcher "Singin' Billy" and a renowned furniture maker and woodworker were born in the area. One of the tales heard by Kibler in an old country store around a potbelly stove has been updated and embellished. A country lad spills a tin pail of milk on a hot summer day. He carries dinner pals to the field hands filled with ham, black-eyed peas and biscuits and watches them drink cold sweet tea from mason jars. A using tale is set at the time of the War Between the States. An immigrant farmer watches as "blue men" raid and empty his smokehouse and burn his barn. A practitioner of using, the farmer summons mysterious powers to save his home and his life. The Anglo-Irish Great House, specifically Coole Park near Galway, is revived and transformed into a Southern country home occupied by a Thoreau-reading son proud of his heritage and line. One story, "The Magnolia Fay," follows the bloom of an old magnolia tree from fragrant and fragile flower to purple seeded cone. In the prelude Kibler promises the reader a "territory of known places," and "pure golden gifts, rounder and brighter that coins." And indeed, he reveals a "joyful land of manifold riches"---woods of tall trees, "possums and coons, lightning bugs, foxgloves and cowslips, and fragrant hay.