Winterchill - Softcover

1st Novel sets old subject on its ear.
Kerry Luft, The Chicago Tribune


Ernest J. Finney is a treasure.  He can take a well-worn theme, turn it inside out, look at it from several angles, and each time find something exciting. In "Winterchill," his first novel, Finney takes on the family, an almost obligatory subject for the first novelist, and sets it on his ear.  The family is the Clarks, who own a 640-acre plum orchard in California.  The principals are the patriarch, Jim, who pieced together the spread, and his grandsons James, a hulking drunkard, and Elmo, younger and smarter.  On the periphery are three others: Gerald, an abandoned child taken in by the Clarks, and James' and Elmo's wives, Greta and Betty.  

The family saga is told in a series of short stories spanning four decades, and each written from a separate point of view.  Artistically, it's a smashing success.  In simple, declarative prose and with masterful storytelling, Finney has created characters we come to care about deeply, despite their failures--or, perhaps more tellingly, because of them.

This "homespun, deceptively simple saga," told from six separate points of view and spanning the '50s through the '80s, focuses on a luckless family and their California plum orchard. "Finney writes about the salt of the earth in the tradition of Steinbeck," said PW . "Without artifice, he gives voice to his characters' rage, dreams, grief and love of the land."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.