Gun Love

November 1, 2017

When Pearl was a baby, her mother fled with her to central Florida and settled in the parking lot next to a trailer camp. (Pearl grew up in the front seat of the car, while her mother claimed the back.) They're friendly with the trailer park folks, but this is gun country, whether for hunting, protection, or show, and the rest is tragedy. From PEN/Faulkner nominee Clement, president of PEN International.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 22, 2018
In her excellent fifth novel, Clement (Prays for the Stolen) tackles homelessness, America’s love affair with guns, and the economic despair of folks living on the dark edge of society. Pearl is a 14-year-old girl living with her mother in an old car next to a crummy trailer park and the town dump in central Florida. The car has been their home since Pearl was born. She and her mother are dreamers (“It doesn’t take too long to figure out that dreams are better than life,” says her mother), but their dreams don’t spare them from tragedy when cop-killing charmer Eli shows up and woos Pearl’s mother, coming between mother and daughter. Eli and trailer neighbors Pastor Rex and Ray are in the gun-running business, selling weapons in Texas and Mexico. When Pearl’s small, insular world is shattered by an armed drifter, she starts on a dangerous path that will change the rest of her life. Clement’s affecting and memorable novel is also an incisive social commentary that will give readers much to ponder.

February 1, 2018
A young girl survives the unpredictable wilds of Florida, searching for a home after the untimely loss of her mother.With "silver hair" and the palest of skin, 14-year-old Pearl is used to being looked at. She has a penchant for risks and cigarettes, and she loves her absent-minded mother, Margot, with tender ferocity. The pair live in a Mercury "at the edge of a trailer park in the middle of Florida," where Margot practices piano scales on the dashboard and hides Limoges porcelain plates in the trunk. "In that car my mother taught me how to set a table and how to serve tea," recalls Pearl. "She showed me how to make a bed using a dishcloth folded around a book." At the heart of their strange community of castoffs is a deceptive pastor whose gunrunning enterprise puts the entire trailer park at risk. And with the arrival of Eli Redmond, "a purebred liar" who has designs on her mother, Pearl somehow understands that her life as she knows it is over. With lyrical grace, Clement (Prayers for the Stolen, 2013, etc.) crafts the careful refrains of Pearl's life. Clement's language snakes and repeats throughout the novel in song and elegy, freighting the tiniest of details--conjoined alligators, a black handgun, even the tragic mythos of slain singer Selena--with meaning. Pearl's story takes place in a world both strange and familiar, in the fairy tale of her mother's imagination and in an America pockmarked by gun violence and poverty. Readers will root for Pearl to--somehow--reconcile the two visions, even as fate forces her hand.Clement's quiet tragedy is moving, unsettling, and filled with characters who will haunt you long after the story ends.

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