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When their hard-drinking, but loving, father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town’s matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys’ story. Candace Jack doesn’t have an ounce of maternal instinct, yet for reasons she does not even understand herself, she is compelled to offer them a home.
Suddenly, the two boys go from living in a small, run-down house on a gravel road to a stately mansion filled with sumptuous furnishings and beautiful artwork—artwork that’s predominantly centered, oddly, on bullfighting. And then there’s Miss Jack’s real-life bull: Ventisco—a regal, hulking, jet-black beast who roams the land she owns with fiery impudence.
Kyle adjusts more easily to the transition. A budding artist, he finds a kindred spirit in Miss Jack. But local baseball hero Klint refuses to warm up to his new benefactress and instead throws himself into his game with a fierceness that troubles his little brother. Klint is not just grieving his father’s death; he’s carrying a terrible secret that he has never revealed to anyone. Unbeknownst to the world, Candace Jack has a secret too—a tragic, passionate past in Spain that the boys’ presence threatens to reveal as she finds herself caring more for them than she ever believed possible.
From the muted, bruised hills of Pennsylvania coal country to the colorful, flamboyant bull rings of southern Spain, Tawni O’Dell takes us on a riveting journey not only between two completely different lands, but also between seemingly incompatible souls, casting us under her narrative spell in which characters and places are rendered with fragile tenderness.
"O'Dell's eye for class conflict remains as sharp as ever, but she's broadened the reach of her sympathies, tamed her taste for lurid plotting and found new depths in her subject matter and her human understanding." - Kirkus Reviews
"O’Dell can overdo the sentiment, but she’s a pro at capturing dialogue, and some characters’ wisecracks are laugh-out-loud funny." - Publishers Weekly
"Her hard-hitting, well-crafted story packs a wallop." - Library Journal
"In this tough and tender tale, O’Dell's triumphant portrait of loss and rejection, sanctuary and redemption, shines with poignancy, dignity, and transcendent joy." - Booklist
This information about Fragile Beasts was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tawni O'Dell is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Sister Mine, Coal Run, Fragile Beasts, and Back Roads, which was an Oprah's Book Club pick and a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection. Back Roads has been made into a movie in 2014, staring Andrew Garfield and Jennifer Garner. She is also a contributor to the anthology, Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female.
Born and raised in Indiana (also the hometown of Jimmy Stewart) in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania ("a beautiful ruined place where the rolling hills are pitted with dead gray mining towns like cigarette burns on a green carpet") O'Dell has been writing fiction since she read Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach when she was six years old. By the time she was eight she had a ...
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Link to Tawni O'Dell's Website
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