Second Son

"Leave at fourteen and never come back." Vernabelle Rice's novel, Second Son, tells the story of Olive Elsa Blaine Jergenson, born in 1907 to an immigrant Norwegian family in Whatcom County, Washington State. "At the ripe old age of fourteen, each child was handed a satchel full of clothes, an extra pair of shoes and three dollars, then put on a bus that took them on the trip to Seattle to make his or her way in the world."

Olli’s first son is born of rape when she is still a minor, then subsequently taken from her. In a day when rape and abuse were not subjects of open or polite conversation, and women tended to suffer from such things in silence, the main character of Rice's narrative exhibits remarkable strength to the point of heroism. During the years of the Great Depression, Olli becomes the virtual matriarch of her extended family, eventually caring for her verbally abusive father as well as many of her siblings and in-laws.

But Second Son isn't just a novel of heroic character in hard times, redemption in the face of austerity and family struggles, it is also a tragic story of human frailty, failing and brokenness in a broken world. Even the strongest among us may succumb to some particular personal weakness buried within the soul, where one's greatest moments of strength can actually hide the fault-lines of self-destruction.

Grippingly truthful, brilliantly human and honest, Second Son cuts to the heart of the human condition like Sartre or Camus, nonetheless with a constant undercurrent of redemption familiar to readers of Flannery O'Conner. The life lessons are there. Vernabelle Rice leaves behind a brief literary legacy that shines so very brightly.