An Eighth of August.

An Eighth of August by Dawn Turner Trice Crown Publishers, October 2000, $22.95, ISBN 0-517-70589-3

Dawn Turner Trice, the author of Only Once I Wished for Heaven, has returned to bookshelves everywhere with a beautifully layered tale about an extended family and its small town dealings in Halley's Landing. The story centers around the town's annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation and opens with the preparations for the 1986 Halley's Landing Emancipation Festival, just a year after the death of a young boy named El. The festival comes with the usual excitement, but also brings back the memories and secrets that surround El's untimely death.

Turner Trice's tightly woven story is told through the eyes of Herbert, husband to goodhearted, but distracted wife Thelma, and father of the troubled Robert "Pepper" Gray. The multifaceted characters that complete Herbert's unseemly family tree lend spice and imagination to a family saga which examines the ramifications of secrets and loss. Trice competently explores the way one set of circumstances can impact a group of individuals' lives in such completely different ways.

An Eighth of August is full of beauty and tenderness, laughter and tears. While the festival provides the backdrop for a tale of the people who inhabit Halley's Landing, it is their voices and the unveiling of their hearts that really paints this emotional story.