Jimmy Crack Corn: A Novel in C Minor

Set in landscapes both terrible and fantastic-yet uncomfortably close to home-Jimmy Crack Corn: A Novel in C Minor recounts the journeys of exhausted urban warrior and DoGooder Jimmy the Bleeder as he explores what it means to be good at something you did not set out to do. Along the way, innocence is remembered, transformed, oppressed, stolen, and restored in both self and other. Inspired by the rhythms of the poignant 19th-century folk song, Jimmy Crack Corn is in the end both an entertaining read and an acute meditation on the preservation of meaning in our everyday lives.Like the folk song on which it draws, Glenn Carley's latest novel lays bare line after line of deeply felt, often achingly familiar truth. In Jimmy Crack Corn, Carley assembles a chorus of vivid, precisely imagined characters grappling with questions of freedom and innocence as only a writer with four decades of social work experience can. Still, the plot, which traces the lived rhythms of 'DoGooder Jimmy the Bleeder, ' plays second fiddle to Carley's full-bodied, typically playful and always poignant language to produce a raw, warm, and lyrical work. ---In the Hills Magazine