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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2001, 384 pages
Paperback:
May 2002, 432 pages
A miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.
If I could
tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years
old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes
close.
With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his
unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall's
high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this
bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a
well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most
of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable.
What persists is Edgar's innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of
language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed
him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of
storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters
as outsized as the landscape of the American West.
Chapter One
THE MAILMAN
If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was
seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing
else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in
God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or
another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a
United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San
Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
It was a typical July day, ten o'clock and already pushing
a hundred, the whole world lit with a painful white light. Our house was
particularly vulnerable to the heat because, unlike the other HUD houses on the
road, it was covered with black tar paper—the siding had never been put on—and
there were no shade trees, not even a bush to block the sun. There was an old
lightning-struck cottonwood in the front yard, a charred skeleton of a tree...
Junot Diaz
A story that tears at you and calls you back. Tony Earley
If Dickens had been born in Arizona, he might have written a book like this.
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