Margaret Cape

I was haunted by the main character Margaret Cape. As a southerner reading a story set in the south, every word was believable and real to me. I don't understand why Wylene Dunbar was not heralded and made famous by this novel. She is as good a story teller as Grisham, Welty and other Mississippi authors who already have their fame! Books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and many by Anne Rivers Siddons came to mind when I read this intriguing tale.

This is a wonderful book, so it came as no surprise that MARGARET CAPE received this year's Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters fiction award, beating out nine other nominated books by top novelists in a state known for its writers. In his note describing Dunbar's award, Bob Summer (southern correspondent, Publishers Weekly) said that "[Dunbar's] stellar achievement is piercing the inner life of a searingly memorable woman in prose often simmering with sheer beauty."

This is a superbly crafted and intricate story of generations, social conventions, prejudices, power, gender roles, and the thin veneer of gentility in the South. But don't mistakenly believe this is just another Southern novel. Dunbar's Margaret Cape is a most unusual protagonist who follows a highly unconventional path to discover and complete her own "story." There is enough psychological brutality, love, conflict, death, sex, and legal battles in this book to satisfy most "beach book" readers, and at the same time those looking for a more "literary" work will be impressed. The unusual plot turns, surprises, and strangeness are quite plausible because Dunbar recreates a world (the context of the South, the changes in the decades from the 1920's to the 1990's, the fragility of the human mind) that allows us to accept them as real. I'd be surprised if this novel doesn't get nominated for one of the book awards