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A Parchment of Leaves is dedicated to the strong women in author Silas House’s life and inspired by his own Cherokee great-grandmother. In the novel, his second, House takes on—and convincingly pulls off—the challenging tasks of portraying a world long gone, and of seeing that world through the eyes of a character from another culture and of the opposite sex. Set in the years before and during World War I, the story is told by Vine, a young Cherokee woman who leaves her family to marry a white man. Though battling homesickness, loneliness, and prejudice, she works to build a home and a marriage and gradually forms close ties among a group of women who often must fend for themselves as the war and other, more personal conflicts take the men away. But then a horrifying incidence of violence leaves Vine with a terrible secret that threatens all of those bonds—unless family and forgiveness can intervene.
Watch the program [requires RealPlayer®].
Card catalog entry from the Library of Congress
Reader’s guide from the publisher, Ballantine Books
Amazon.com information page
Barnes and Noble information page
A Family, in the Leaves—an article about the book, with comments from Silas, from the November 20, 2002 Independent Weekly
Author reveals writing method to book club readers—an article about the writing of Parchment and Bowling Green’s One Campus—One Community—One Book project centered on it (Bowling Green Daily News, 3/19/04)
Also on our shelves: Silas’ first novel, Clay’s Quilt, was our August 2002 selection.
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