STRONG HOLLOW
by Linda Little
Goose Lane Editions, 280 pp.
Jackson Bigley is the unlikely hero of Linda Little's debut novel, Strong Hollow, and is only 19 when he comes across his father, Vernon, dead in a ditch. The death draws all the grown Bigley children home to the backwoods family farm in Nova Scotia, where they settle down to stay after the funeral. There they resurrect the fighting that soured their childhoods and the alcoholism that killed their father.
Jackson has to escape. He builds a cabin in the woods to be alone and drink himself into a stupor. But a young fiddler named Ian Sutherland brings Jackson back to life with moments of passion, love and a heartache so deep it threatens to destroy him.
Jackson relies on booze to numb his pain. After many days he wakes up, hurting but alive and determined to give up drinking for good. He fills long days and empty nights by creating a fiddle, and frees his thoughts as he liberates the fiddle from the wood.
Strong Hollow is the story of a delicate young man stuck in a dead-end life he does not belong to. But by making something beautiful, he begins to accept himself and turn sensitivity into strength.
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