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Finally, an Okie book worth reading

S

soonerthebetter

New Member
I'm not sure if it's okay to post this, but as an Oklahomer I'm always on the lookout for books that take place in my home state.

So somehow I recently stumbled onto a 'book in progress' site for something called The Wellbaby. It's about a girl who got her 15 minutes of fame after she was rescued after falling into a well as a baby and what happens to her when she grows up. It starts in 1988 and takes place in a small town in Oklahoma in that could be the one I grew up in.

You can download four chapters of the book right now and the author says he's going to make half the book available for free. Normally this kind of realistic fiction isn't my favorite genre but the title character, Amanda Prahl reminds me of the some of the girls I grew up, only she's a lot funnier.

Anyway, the site for the book is WELLBABYBOOK.COM
 
I think our own DavidRM is an Okie, no? I think one of his books about a girl and horses takes place in OK as well.
 
Yup yup. Live in Tulsa, and "The Girl Who Ran With Horses" starts by *leaving* Tulsa, headed for her home town of Antlers. =)

I went to check out the Wellbaby book, but the PDF's of the first couple chapters were gone.

When I was writing "The Girl Who Ran With Horses", I posted the first draft chapters to my blog as I finished them. I had done that with another book, as well, but I don't think I'll do it again. So I can kinda understand why the PDF's might have been pulled.

-David
 
After seeing this post I took a look. The Wellbaby is out on Amazon Kindle and the official web site for the book now offers one chapter in HTML. The first 30 pages are available for free on Amazon. Since I'm an Amazon Prime member I was able to 'borrow it' for free. Even if you're not with Prime, it's well worth the 3 bucks.

I'm from a tiny little dust bowl town in southern Kansas, and I can say with authority that Iron Lake, the small town in The Wellbaby, is just like mine. Good-time teenagers who work as waitresses, broker roadhouses, redneck cops, dirty politicians and lots of nothing for miles around.

The story is essentially a fictional treatment of the Baby Jessica. She was the baby who fell down a well in 1989 and was rescued by a local volunteer firemen after the army dug a separate rescue hole so he could dig a tunnel between the two wells. I think she lost a toe and then people sent thousands of dollars in gifts a trust fund set up for her. I read somewhere that she grew up in a happy home and is now a married mother and her trust fund ended up with nearly a half million dollars.

That's definitely not what happens to Amanda Prahl, the wellbaby of the novel. Without getting into details, her childhood is a mess, and when she goes to claim her own trust fund--which she's been waiting for her whole life--it's all gone. This scene is available for free on Amazon and it's one of the funniest chapter I've ever read.

I really liked the book. The author really understands what it's like to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, but it's not morose at all. Amanda is a great character--funny, vulgar, obscene, angry, sarcastic, tender, hard-as-nails and a wild drunk and even wilder in bed (yes, there's some pretty graphic sex in there).

And the ending--which brings all the main characters together--is one of the best set pieces I've read in a long time. If you like realistic fiction that leaves you laughing your a** off one minute and grabbing for the kleenex the next, I highly recommend it.
 
Well, two years after my first post this thing has finally come out. I'll say that the first four chapters (which you can view on Amazon) are nearly completely rewritten and much better than they were on the web site.

Part of me is really offended by the way the author's portrayal of many Okies as schemers, rednecks and provincial yahoos, but I do have to admit that there's a large element of truth in these depictions. My life is lot like that of the main male character, Floyd Smoll. I lived most of my life in a very small, one-company Dust Bowl town. When the company went belly up in 2007 I was out of work for nearly two years. I started drinking too much and started listening to right-wing radio shows and hanging around with other unemployed men and somehow moved from an apolitical moderate to a fire-breathing extremist that would make your average Tea Partier seem like an Obama Democrat.

Fortunately for me I ended up getting a job in another state and after I moved there met and married a woman who 'cured' me of my toxic views. I'm no liberal, but at least I've escaped the cycle of blaming all of my misfortunes on minorities.

The point here is that while Amanda Prahl is a great character, it's Floyd's story that I find most compelling and true to life. He's a clinical case study of how angry white man become that way and are easily brainwashed by extremists.
 
The funny thing?, at one time, Oklahoma was chock full of socialist state legislators.

Not an Oklahoman, but I lived in Ada for about six years and moved on to Nebraska. No need to bring up Barry Switzer, we Nebraskans are all too aware of that painful time in our football history.
 
SFG75 said:
The funny thing?, at one time, Oklahoma was chock full of socialist state legislators.
Click to expand...

So was most of the southwest. I'm reading Robert Caro's first volume of this LBJ biography, and it's truly amazing how leftist many people were out here back then. Nearly all the farmers were rabid New Dealers who hated big business.

I also read Thomas Franks What's the Matter with Kansas a few years ago, which really examined how the conservatives were able to win the hearts of minds of the state's traditionally wrong-headed progressive population.



Getting back to The Wellbaby, the politics are all over the place. Amanda seems to be pretty economically conservative--she's an NRA member, owns a gun, and complains about paying taxes to pay the unemployment benefits, yet she's got a thing against the town's fatcats and her best friend is a black woman who [SPOILER ALERT] she defends against racial attacks.
 
I'm from Oklahoma and I was quite young when baby Jessica actually fell into the well, but I remember from recent stories of updates on local news stations of how well she's turned out. Thanks for the information and post, I wasn't aware that a book was made of the incident, I'll be checking it out.

Okie proud here =)


Happy reading!
 
Kimberly said:
I'm from Oklahoma and I was quite young when baby Jessica actually fell into the well, but I remember from recent stories of updates on local news stations of how well she's turned out. Thanks for the information and post, I wasn't aware that a book was made of the incident, I'll be checking it out.

Okie proud here =)


Happy reading!
Click to expand...

Jessica and her family lived in Texas. I didn't know about the '71 Oklahoma case. Learn something new every day. :)
 
I heard about this on another book forum and decided to give it a try, even though I generally stay away from self-published fiction.

I'm glad I didn't this time, because The Wellbaby is one of the best and most thoughtfully written novels I've read in a long time. It's not an easy read. Its characters are deeply flawed, as most people are. Many of the things that happen are psychologically disturbing but are no more unusual than you'd read about in your daily newspaper of see blazed across CNN.

However, if you're expected a fast-paced, tightly plotted story you'll have to change gears to enjoy the narrative richness of this book. It takes a while for the main storyline to get going and there's a bit of exposition and backstory to get through. I see the point. Grenville isn't just telling a story; he's creating an entire town, complete with its own history and culture, and filling in the key life events of his main characters to provide a rationale for their later behavior. Fortunately, most of this happens in the first few chapters of the book, and Grenville wisely alternates these more expositional chapters with "action" scenes (usually involving Amanda) that jump from comedy to drama in the wink of an eye.

[Warning; Teeny tiny spoiler alert]

But once it starts going it's hard to put down, with a number of twists that knock you for a loop. The final chapters of the book are totally gripping and emotionally satisfying. I wish more people read this book so I could discuss it with them, because it is a book that could definitely stand up to literary analysis. I definitely see the influences of Greek myths (without giving too much away, Amanda is in some ways a modern day Aphrodite and and Eurydice rolled into one), Faulkner's The Hamlet and The Last Picture Show. But Grenville has turned these influences into something highly original.
 
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Zack Grenville here.

In celebration of the quite-expensive print version of The Wellbaby finally available for sale on Amazon, and as a thank-you to the kind readers who have commented on the book, I'm making the classic and far more affordable Kindle version available for free for one day only--Sunday October 6th, 2013. That's a whopping $2.99 savings! Woo hoo!

Enjoy!

Zack Grenville
Author, The Wellbaby



 
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