Crossing Bully Creek (Milkweed National Fiction Prize) - Softcover

Some scientists think humans are hard-wired to strongly prefer the familiar, however detrimental to the human condition it might be. Consequently, the end of any era is inevitably tinged with poignancy, nostalgia, and usually not a little romanticizing as relief mingles with regret. At Henry Detroit's death at the end of the 1960s, the Longbow plantation dies and with it a way of life that includes old slave shanties and lynchings. Told from the varying points of view of a series of characters whose family trees are provided, the novel presents overlapping "panels" of reality and calls into question notions of perspective as young Henry copes with the death of his baby, and his wife, Rowena, realizes it is easier to speak with him when he isn't there. Erhart's well-crafted, compelling portrait of the Deep South from the Depression to the Vietnam era swings back and forth in time, encompassing even the letters from William Tecumseh Sherman, Rowena's grandfather, to his wife, which Rowena reads for comfort as her son ships out in 1941. Whitney Scott
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"Crossing Bully Creek is likely to be mentioned in the same breath with Faulkner because they share some commendable commonalities." -- The Historical Novels Review, August 2005

"Erhart’s descriptions of her characters are reminiscent of Jane Austen’s, in their devastating precision." -- Los Angeles Times

"Erhart’s style is evocative of both Faulkner and Hemingway." -- The Covey Rise