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Blues Lessons
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Blues Lessons Hardback - 2001

by Robert Hellenga

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From the publisher

Growing up on his family's orchards in Appleton, Michigan, in the 1950s, Martin Dijksterhuis finds everything he needs in his extended family and in the land itself -- in the reassuring routines of growing and harvesting, spraying and pruning. Although his mother wants him to get out of Appleton, which she finds impossibly provincial, and attend a great university -- the University of Chicago, her alma mater -- he has no desire to leave.

In the autumn of his junior year of high school, however, in the camp of the migrant workers who come north every year to pick the Dijksterhuis peaches and apples, Martin discovers his vocation, the country blues -- unsettling melodies that cry out from a place in the soul he never knew existed. He also falls in love with Corinna Williams, the strong-willed daughter of the black foreman who runs the Dijksterhuis orchards. His blues vocation and his love for Corinna are the two stories of his life. His struggle to combine them into a single story takes him a long way from home and from the life he had always envisioned for himself, and then it brings him back again in a way he could never have imagined.

In this beautifully rendered novel, Robert Hellenga, author of "The Sixteen Pleasures" and "The Fall of a Sparrow," explores the fragility of happiness, the difficulties of following one's calling in life, and the sorrows and satisfactions of being a parent.

Details

  • Title Blues Lessons
  • Author Robert Hellenga
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 336
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Scribner Book Company, New York
  • Publication date December 18, 2001
  • ISBN 9780743225335 / 0743225333
  • Weight 1.25 lbs (0.57 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.46 x 6.4 x 1.06 in (24.03 x 16.26 x 2.69 cm)
  • Category Fiction - General
  • Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, Love stories
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2002277865
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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