[In the following review, Folks offers a positive assessment of the writing and characterizations in Feather Crowns.]

In Feather Crowns Bobbie Ann Mason traces the life of Christianna Wilburn Wheeler or “Christie,” a young farm woman in western Kentucky who gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America. Mason's historical fiction, which is inspired from an actual event but creates a wholly fictionalized community and richly detailed setting, succeeds admirably in telling “a life story” with realism and balance. In first-person narration, Mason reveals a woman whose ordinary life is transformed by a unique event. Driven by curiosity and by her insistence on keeping her heart alive, Christie triumphs by stubbornly preserving her selfhood within a world in which she, as a relatively poor, uneducated rural woman at the turn of the century, would be expected to have little self-determination.

The appealing realism and intelligence of Mason's central character illuminate a complex weave of class status, racial background, family connection, personal ambition, and happenstance events that largely determine one's life in the agrarian community. Perhaps most determinative is gender, and Mason uncovers the essential divide between female and male experience at the time. During her marriage, surrounded by James's family on Wheeler land where she and James have relocated, Christie learns to resist the “smothering” of family, and she develops a need for friends “who are not kin.”

Another determinant of American rural life was the folk culture of tale-telling, social custom, beliefs and sayings through which individuals interpreted their experience. The birth of the Wheeler quintuplets is surrounded by woman's lore about pregnancy and birthing: “Her mother always said if a woman couldn't nurse her babies, they would never grow up to mind her.” The most important example of folklore is the belief that the discovery of “feather crowns”—two or more feathers intertwined to form “crowns” at the end—may forebode death in the household or “heaven” for the deceased. Although Christie questions this and other superstitions, she cannot fully isolate herself from the communal thinking. After her quintuplets die within weeks of their birth, Christie searches for answers beyond the conventional wisdom of church and community. The mystery of their unique birth, her own celebrity, her exploitation at the hands of others who profit from her fame, her survival of the quintuplets and of her husband James, who dies in a farm accident—the astonishing fact of her very being, of life and death at a particular time in history—for these facts no ready-made “answers” are provided.

Feather Crowns is a superbly written and richly peopled novel. Mason evokes the economic and physical problems of rural existence not far removed from the American frontier. The harshness of this life is implied in the birthday party given for Alma's son Arch: “For a child to live to his tenth year was always a cause of celebration.” Through the remarkable character of Christianna Wheeler, Mason suggests that, against such confining and dehumanizing circumstances, individual lives continue to struggle toward fulfillment. During her ninetieth year Christie begins to tell her story to an unnamed younger woman: despite all the disillusionment of her long life, Christie's intellectual curiosity and enjoyment of friendship are undiminished.