Marja-Leena Rathje

Marly Youman’s latest book, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, published by
Mercer University Press, and winner of the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction, is coming out on March 30th.

From the flap: After a death at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque journey, he sweeps through society, revealing the highest and lowest in human nature and only slowly coming to self-understanding. He searches the points of the compass for what will help, groping for a place where he can feel content, certain that he has no place where he belongs and that he rides the rails through a great darkness. His difficult path to collect enough radiance to light his way home is the road of a boy struggling to come to terms with the cruel but sometimes lovely world of Depression-era America.

Author Ron Rash writes: Marly Youmans’ new book is a vividly realized, panoramic novel of survival during The Great Depression. There is poetry in Youmans’ writing, but she also knows how to tell a riveting story.

I was delighted to be given an opportunity to ask Marly a question about her book:
“White Camellia” is an unusual name for an orphanage -where did that come from?

Marly’s answer:
I’m not entirely sure, since the orphanage seemed to name itself, but there are two main strands of meaning that I see. One is important to the setting, and the other is important to events.

So “White Camellia Orphanage” suggests a whole complex of things: the Georgia landscape around Lexsy with the rickety, unpainted house and outbuildings where I spent some time each summer; the shining “camellia” hedge that turned out to be no camellia at all; the Knights of the White Camellia; the Invisible Empire of the K. K. K. and their ideas about white rule, white purity, and miscegenation. All those things, though not “spelled out,” exert force on events in A “Death at the White Camellia Orphanage”.

I am really looking forward to reading this compelling and exciting sounding novel! You may pre-order it at your favorite brick-and-mortar independent, chain, or online bookstore (probably just the latter here in Canada at the moment).

I’ve become well acquainted with Marly through her blog of the most magical name The Palace at 2:00 a.m.. Do visit and note what a prolific writer she is with a long list of published books of poetry and many kinds of fiction. Congratulations and best wishes, Marly, may your latest creation fly into numerous homes and hearts!