POKE SALLET QUEEN AND THE FAMILY MEDICINE WHEEL (THORNTON, SHANA)

"Reading Shana Thornton's highly original novel will make you want to get your own family stories to the page. You'll meet larger-than-life characters like Hoot and Zona, Aunt Cora and Jane, Miss Emy, and Nenny, the matriarch, who rolls her own cigarettes and knows all the secrets of the family medicine wheel. You may even find yourself signing up for a writing class like the one that sets the narrator, young Robin Ballard, to interviewing her aunts and grandmother, tracking down her homeless father, and digging out the family secrets, lost journals, and recipes that make Poke Sallet Queen & the Family Medicine Wheel a most surprising and satisfying fictional family history. (At least, I think it's fiction!)"-Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Turk and My Mother and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia **** "Vibrant in detail! Meet and fall in love with the characters of Poke Sallet Queen and the Family Medicine Wheel and along the way, learn the secrets of great story-telling." -Bud Willis, author of Marble Mountain: A Vietnam Memoir **** "When I'm given a book to review, I like to open it up at rando