Wintershine: A Book of Maps, Pictures, Laments, Celebrations, Praise

A woman's memories of her Depression-era childhood in Arkansas and Texas provide the framework for this layered tale. Caram ( Dear Corpus Christi ) manipulates memory on more than one level, weaving not only the narrator's memories but those of the narrator's mother as well. That, after all, is part of childhood: listening to the adults tell the stories of their own childhoods. The language is natural enough to give a sense of the geography and the times, and the initial unsympathetic tone insures that these remembrances are neither sugar-coated nor laden with the psychological weight of the world. Storms are the novel's leitmotif. Beatrice Merrill's mother loves to describe the tornado of 1914, which lifted her home off the ground, and the narrator herself vividly recalls a hurricane that struck the south Texas coast, describing the thrill and fear of wind and rain as only a child can experience it. None of this quite prepares the reader for the ending, though, where suddenly the author slips in an angel, or the narrator's vision of one. This is the ``wintershine,'' and it contributes to a homey, though not very plausible, ending. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Jan.)