Praise for Pursuing Daisy Garfield
What critics and scholars are saying
Pursuing Daisy Garfield echoes with the same searching tones of religion and humanity that infused The Shepherd of the Hills. Exploring the same White River country that provided the backdrop of Harold Bell Wright's classic novel more than a century ago.
—Dr. Brooks Blevins, Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark Studies, Missouri State University. Author of A History of the Ozarks in three volumes, and several other books.
Pursuing Daisy Garfield uses the language and lore of nineteenth-century hill country to tell a tale as morally fraught as a backwoods tent revival and as filled with the pleasures of the unexpected as a float trip down a spring-fed Ozark stream.
—Barry Bergey, retired former Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts and co-founder of Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts
Pursuing Daisy Garfield is a mystery story with a strong sense of place, mixed with old-time religion and meditations about life itself. At the center of it all is Daisy Garfield, whose stunning features bewitch and attract men from the time of her youth. Musings on truth, beauty, heaven and hell all come together. Starting down the road is easy and well worth it.
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The path through the story, for an old-time storyteller, is just as much pleasure as the story itself. The style of Pursuing Daisy Garfield is ruminative, digressive, given to meditations on things lofty and low. . . . Pursuing Daisy Garfield strikes me as an ultimately earnest book, one that takes seriously the questions of faith and fate its characters meditate upon.
—Steve Wiegenstein, historian and author of Slant of Light and numerous other works