In Country (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Bobbie Ann Mason
- First Published: 1985
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: Girls, Self-discovery, United States or Americans, Parents and children, Adolescence, Teenagers, 1980’s, Vietnam War, War, Fathers
- Locales: Washington, D.C., Hopewell, KY
The two main characters of In Country are Sam Hughes, a seventeen-year-old girl from Hopewell, Kentucky, and her uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam War veteran. Emmett becomes a surrogate parent for Sam because her father died in Vietnam before her birth and her mother has remarried and established a new family miles away in Lexington. Sam and Emmett live together in a decrepit house and form another of Mason's unconventional modern families.
With these two main characters Mason combines the themes of initiation and recovery. In the course of the summer, Sam comes of age, and...
[The entire page is 755 words long]
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