About the Book
"Dark and dangerous and strange and wonderful...Kennedy writes with the gritty poetry of Daniel Woodrell and misfit sensibility of Flannery O'Connor." --Benjamin Percy
Five-year-old Daisy Gonzalez's father is always waiting for her at the bus stop. But today, he isn't, and Daisy disappears.
When Daisy goes missing, nearly everyone in town suspects or knows something different about what happened. And they also know a lot about each other. The immigrants who work in the dairy farm know their employers' secrets. The hairdresser knows everything except what's happening in her own backyard. And the roadkill collector knows love and heartbreak more than anyone would ever expect. They are all connected, in ways small and profound, open and secret.
By turns unsettling, dark, and wry, Kennedy's powerful voice brings the town's rich fabric to life. Tornado Weather is an affecting portrait of a complex and flawed cast of characters striving to find fulfillment in their lives - and Kennedy brilliantly shows that there is nothing average about an average life.
About the Author :
Deborah Kennedy is a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salon, Sou'wester, Third Coast Magazine, and The North American Review. Kennedy has worked as both a reporter and editor, and also holds a master's in Fiction Writing and English Literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.Tornado Weather is her debut.
Review :
Tornado Weather is dark and dangerous and strange and wonderful, and Deborah E. Kennedy writeswith the gritty poetry of Daniel Woodrell and misfit sensibility of FlanneryO Connor. So many characters swirl together their stories compiling with cyclonic force into this layered, powerful study of a small town in decline.
Benjamin Percy, bestselling author of Thrill Me, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding
Deborah Kennedy's vision is as clear as her embrace is wide. With Tornado Weather, she has given us a novel that startles and surprises from the first page to the last, turning our heads again and again. Yet the thunderclaps the book produces are not those of a thriller, despite the missing child at its center, but of how many human beings it seems to know, and how variously it inhabits them. In the abundance with which it is populated, and the diversity with which it is colored, it offers something considerably more than the fragments of a few stray characters. It offers the mosaic of an entire community.
Kevin Brockmeier, bestselling author of The Brief History of the Dead
"A wonderful novel. Deborah E. Kennedy's Tornado Weather has a very distinctive energy, and there is real pathos along with subtle humor. The characters are from a social class that is too often overlooked and misrepresented. Kennedy gives them their due, with all their resourcefulness, resilience, and suffering intact."
Charles Baxter, bestselling author of The Feast of Love
"Kennedy s engrossing portrait of rural Indiana is as compassionate as it is knowing. In language that is searing, knowing, and often brutally funny, Deborah Kennedy brings an entire rural town to life. Without condescension or caricature, she draws out the intertwining threads in the lives of a town populated in equal measure by the feckless and the blameless and examines the fabric of small town America its poverties and prejudices, the preoccupations and hopes of a group of people striving to live their livesin a place that prosperity has left behind. Tornado Weather holds to the light the curses that nature sends, the curses we bring on ourselves, the curses we outlive and the curses we break the ways of the human heart both bright and dark. Truthful and timely, Kennedy s vision will spin you up into its still, silent, eye, wreck every bone in your body and touch you back down into a landscape that has been utterly transformed. Simply breathtaking. Chase this one like the tornado that it is."
Amy Parker, author of Beasts and Children
Generates a rain wall of wonder .Watch out for this one!
Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
"
-Tornado Weather is dark and dangerous and strange and wonderful, and Deborah E. Kennedy writeswith the gritty poetry of Daniel Woodrell and misfit sensibility of FlanneryO'Connor. So many characters swirl together--their stories compiling with cyclonic force--into this layered, powerful study of a small town in decline.-
--Benjamin Percy, bestselling author of Thrill Me, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding
-Deborah Kennedy's vision is as clear as her embrace is wide. With Tornado Weather, she has given us a novel that startles and surprises from the first page to the last, turning our heads again and again. Yet the thunderclaps the book produces are not those of a thriller, despite the missing child at its center, but of how many human beings it seems to know, and how variously it inhabits them. In the abundance with which it is populated, and the diversity with which it is colored, it offers something considerably more than the fragments of a few stray characters. It offers the mosaic of an entire community.-
--Kevin Brockmeier, bestselling author of The Brief History of the Dead
-A wonderful novel. Deborah E. Kennedy's Tornado Weather has a very distinctive energy, and there is real pathos along with subtle humor. The characters are from a social class that is too often overlooked and misrepresented. Kennedy gives them their due, with all their resourcefulness, resilience, and suffering intact.-
--Charles Baxter, bestselling author of The Feast of Love
-Kennedy's engrossing portrait of rural Indiana is as compassionate as it is knowing. In language that is searing, knowing, and often brutally funny, Deborah Kennedy brings an entire rural town to life. Without condescension or caricature, she draws out the intertwining threads in the lives of a town populated in equal measure by the feckless and the blameless--and examines the fabric of small town America--its poverties and prejudices, the preoccupations and hopes of a group of people striving to live their livesin a place that prosperity has left behind. Tornado Weather holds to the light the curses that nature sends, the curses we bring on ourselves, the curses we outlive and the curses we break--the ways of the human heart both bright and dark. Truthful and timely, Kennedy's vision will spin you up into its still, silent, eye, wreck every bone in your body and touch you back down into a landscape that has been utterly transformed. Simply breathtaking. Chase this one like the tornado that it is.-
--Amy Parker, author of Beasts and Children
-Generates a rain wall of wonder....Watch out for this one!-
--Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
"Tornado Weather is dark and dangerous and strange and wonderful, and Deborah E. Kennedy writeswith the gritty poetry of Daniel Woodrell and misfit sensibility of FlanneryO'Connor. So many characters swirl together--their stories compiling with cyclonic force--into this layered, powerful study of a small town in decline."
--Benjamin Percy, bestselling author of Thrill Me, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding
"Deborah Kennedy's vision is as clear as her embrace is wide. With Tornado Weather, she has given us a novel that startles and surprises from the first page to the last, turning our heads again and again. Yet the thunderclaps the book produces are not those of a thriller, despite the missing child at its center, but of how many human beings it seems to know, and how variously it inhabits them. In the abundance with which it is populated, and the diversity with which it is colored, it offers something considerably more than the fragments of a few stray characters. It offers the mosaic of an entire community."
--Kevin Brockmeier, bestselling author of The Brief History of the Dead
"A wonderful novel. Deborah E. Kennedy's Tornado Weather has a very distinctive energy, and there is real pathos along with subtle humor. The characters are from a social class that is too often overlooked and misrepresented. Kennedy gives them their due, with all their resourcefulness, resilience, and suffering intact."
--Charles Baxter, bestselling author of The Feast of Love
"Kennedy's engrossing portrait of rural Indiana is as compassionate as it is knowing. In language that is searing, knowing, and often brutally funny, Deborah Kennedy brings an entire rural town to life. Without condescension or caricature, she draws out the intertwining threads in the lives of a town populated in equal measure by the feckless and the blameless--and examines the fabric of small town America--its poverties and prejudices, the preoccupations and hopes of a group of people striving to live their livesin a place that prosperity has left behind. Tornado Weather holds to the light the curses that nature sends, the curses we bring on ourselves, the curses we outlive and the curses we break--the ways of the human heart both bright and dark. Truthful and timely, Kennedy's vision will spin you up into its still, silent, eye, wreck every bone in your body and touch you back down into a landscape that has been utterly transformed. Simply breathtaking. Chase this one like the tornado that it is."
--Amy Parker, author of Beasts and Children
"Generates a rain wall of wonder....Watch out for this one!"
--Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
