“In my defense, she was great fodder, and this was years before she killed our neighbor.” That was the sentence, on page 4, that made me fall in love with The Book of Polly, by Kathy Hepinstall. The novel opens with the narrator, Willow, age 10, and her mother Polly, age 68, heading to Willow’s school with a falcon in the backseat of their car.
Willow, a polished liar, had told her class that Polly hunted with a falcon. When Willow was called out for the lie, Polly swooped in to prove the school wrong. And so, on an otherwise ordinary day, Polly walked carefully down a school corridor in Texas with the borrowed bird of prey on her shoulder.
“No one calls my daughter a liar,” she said.
The first part of this brilliant novel is a romp, a hoot, a slap-you-knee look at an unconventional woman who seems as tough as she is bold. There are fights with neighbors. Fights with the squirrels that threaten to decimate Polly’s garden. Fights between mother and daughter over Polly’s smoking.
And of course, that unfortunate neighbor dies.
But as the book evolves, the story of Polly and Willow becomes one of great hope and tenderness. A disease Polly will only call the Bear arrives, threatening to take her life. As she struggles, Willow fights to keep her mother alive.
Polly’s son comes home after breaking up with his wife, and the family dynamic changes. Willow sees the cracks in the foundation of her home. How her dead daddy’s penchant for drinking has settled in her brother, causing his life to teeter.
And then there’s the mystery Polly left in Louisiana more than half a century before that involved the killing of a preacher, the end of a love story, and plenty of regret.
Before the book ends, Willow and Polly travel back to Louisiana in hopes of finding a cure for Polly. There is so much tenderness in this book, and so much love between Willow, now 16, and her ailing mother, that it felt like a gift just to read it.
I returned The Book of Polly today to the Alma Public Library. If I were you, I’d put it on hold right now. It’s just that good.