Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven

First novelist McElmurray vividly captures the harsh realities of God-haunted Eastern Kentucky in this intense, gloomy, multigenerational tale. Choice and the striving for redemption are her two irreconcilable yet knotted themes, the dual impulses at war in the Blue-Wallen family. Abandoned by her mother when she is 10, Ruth Blue lives for a dozen years alone with her father, Tobias, an itinerant preacher, gambler and drunk based in small-town Inez, Ky. At first she pins her hopes for deliverance on her husband, Earl Wallen, a WWII veteran who has abandoned his songwriting dreams for a job in the coal mines near Inez, but in time she realizes that ""Tobias and Earl became the same to me, the same voices, saying Ruth do this and that, their shadows crossing each other on the kitchen floor."" When her son, Andrew, is born, Ruth believes momentarily that she is biblically fulfilled, a giver of life. But when the mines shut down and she is forced to work as a maid to support the family, Ruth turns to an all-powerful God, eventually training her religious obsession on Andrew, who has grown up loving men. As the book begins, 30-year-old Andrew drives off for an evening with his lover, flamboyant Henry Ward. When he is back home in bed that night, his mother lays Earl's rifle beside him, instructing him to choose his destiny. Meanwhile, Ruth settles her own fate. Skipping back and forth in time, McElmurray sets herself the task of expressing the deepest truths of faith and human nature, relying on the power of symbols like music, postcards, moonlight, photos and water in her ambitious, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Though her prose is uneven--inspired in places and flat in others--McElmurray succeeds in conveying the enormity of choices made in a world governed by fervent beliefs. 16-city author tour. (Sept.)