Thirteen Miles from Suncrest A Novel Author:Donald Davis Donald Davis inhabits this novel as the journal-keeping Medford McGee, a wide-eyed ten-year-old boy mystified by the rituals of adulthood and the march of technology into rural North Carolina in 1910. The one automobile in Close Creek awes Medford, and the telegraph machine dumbfounds him. "The modern world," says Medford, "is just about here no... more »w." The Sunday issue of The Nashville Banner,sent every week by Aunt Louise through the mail and read a week later by Mr. McGee on the porch, is the family's peephole into the outside world. Medford speculates about lighter-than-air planes ("like a blowed-up hog's bladder I guess"), the search for the South Pole ("maybe it goes all the way through the middle of the earth and the other end sticks out and is the North Pole"), and the custom-made bathtub of Mr. Taft, the oversized new president. Even more interesting is the peephole that Medford's journal provides into the life of Close Creek. With sisters busy "a courtin" in the salon, "blab school" to attend, and a bobcat on the loose, life in Close Creek is not as quiescent as one might imagine the turn-of-the-century South to be. Nor is it free of the troubles of the world, and when barns mysteriously burn down and a neighbor's daughter disappears, the social fabric of Close Creek is tested. Readers savoring the rhythms of a simpler world will ultimately find themselves surrendering to the cadences of a master storyteller.« less