The Healing (Bluestreak)

About this book

Gayl Joness special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant The New Republic Gayl Joness first novel Corregidora won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping subtle and sure. It was praised along with her second novel Evas Man by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike Maya Angelou John Edgar Wideman and James Baldwin to name a few. The publication of The Healing her first novel in over twenty years is a literary event. Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer traveling by bus to small towns converting skeptics restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock stars manager and before that a beautician. Shes had a fling with her rock stars ex-husband and an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way shes somehow lost her own husband a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale-the story of her first healing. The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain anger and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlans memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of the black Southerner Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.