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Praise for The Woodsman’s Daughter:
The Woodman’s Daughter was chosen by the Louisville Courier-Journal as one of the Best 10 Books of the Year.
“.... A third Kentucky novelist, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, earned national attention for her first novel, "Icy Sparks," which not only was a best-seller, but also an Oprah's Book Club selection. "The Woodsman's Daughter," her second novel, is in many ways more ambitious, with an epic story set in the piney woods of Georgia. Rubio, who lives in Versailles, is not only a gifted storyteller; her use of the language is invariably just right.” - Keith Runyon, Book Page Editor
The Louisville Courier-Journal
Talk about a dysfunctional family! Dalia Miller, the title character of Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s stunning second novel, The Woodsman’s Daughter, is the only survivor of her family of four: her father, Monroe, a self-made entrepreneur in the turpentine business of the South Georgia piney woods who is haunted by a sexual indiscretion that may have infected him and his family with syphilis; her withdrawn, drug-addicted mother, Violet; and her blind sister, Nellie Ann, whose half-life is finally cut short by the grotesque flowering of her father’s earlier philandering in Savannah. MORE
Peace Corps Writers
When your first novel is an Oprah Book Club Selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the year, it’s a daunting task to come up with an encore. So if you’re wise, you create a novel different enough from the first that makes it unfair to invite comparison. Icy Sparks author Gwyn Hyman Rubio succeeds both with this and with the tale in her latest, an epic multigenerational family saga. MORE
Reader’s Review from Amazon.com
While it is true that The Woodsman’s Daughter is a story of women struggling against the oppressions of late-19th/early 20th century South Georgia society--and a convincing one, making us feel the effects of that oppression in nearly every aspect of these women’s lives--it is far more nuanced and complex a novel than such a description suggests. MORE
The Lexington Herald-Leader
In this captivating epic, set in post-Civil War southern Georgia, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, the acclaimed author of Oprah selection Icy Sparks, sweeps us into a world where upper-class wealth intersects with the poverty of laboring shantytowns, a place where terrible human suffering manifests itself. MORE
The Denver Post
Woods of longleaf pine and a family in trouble give rise to The Woodsman's Daughter. South Georgia at the end of the 19th century is the starting point for author Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and she spins a tale that follows one young woman along a rocky road from youth to maturity. MORE
The Woodman’s Daughter was chosen as a pick of the month by Alan Caruba, founding member of the National Book Critics Circle and Bookviews.com editor
A very different story is told by Gwyn Hyman Rubio in The Woodsman's Daughter. This novel spans three generations, starting in southern Georgia in the late 1800s and Dalia Miller, the sassy, beautiful darling of her father, Monroe, a shrewd and prosperous turpentine farmer. The story moves between the shantytowns of the gothic South and the social hierarchy of both grand estates and small towns. Dalia's comfortable life crumbles around her and her struggle gives us a compelling new character from a bygone age. This author has considerable gifts and we look forward to her future work.
The Greensboro News-Record
“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” says the main character at one point in “The Woodsman’s Daughter.” That paraphrase from the Book of Exodus sounds the theme of Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s new novel. MORE
The Woodsman’s Daughter is a Book Club Pick of the Week for September 2005 on the Barnes and Noble web site, BN.com.
An American Booksellers Association “Book Sense Pick” for August 2005:
Rubio - the author of Icy Sparks - has created another memorable character and story. The setting - 1800s southern Georgia - is different from our own, but the anguish and conflicts of the characters are universal.” - Kay Vincent, Bohannons’ Books With a Past, Georgetown, KY
Second place award for the “Elle’s Lettres” Readers’ Prize in the September 2005 issue:
Rubio’s richly layered tale spans the life of Dalia Miller, the daughter of a prosperous turpentine farmer whose penchant for gambling and booze leads his family to disown him. The strong bond between Dalia and her blind and ailing sister, Nellie Ann, is key to learning who Dalia is and will become. Setting her saga perfectly against a Southern backdrop, Rubio provides memorable characters who ever so elegantly help to drive Dalia mad. This is not a novel of fairy-tale endings but a revealing glimpse of one woman’s efforts to rise above tragedy. - Lindsay Laird, Edwards, CA
Andrea Hoag, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Apparently undaunted by the overnight success of her debut novel, 1998's "Icy Sparks" --- an Oprah Book Club pick --- Gwyn Hyman Rubio returns with "The Woodsman's Daughter," an engrossing novel that affirms the Versailles, Ky., author's genius for those little gestures that lend her novels a cinematic quality. MORE
Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association
Rubio's follow-up to her Oprah-anointed debut novel, Icy Sparks (1998), is set in rural post-Civil War Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Dalia Miller is the center of an unhappy household that includes her alcoholic father, Monroe; her distant mother, Violet; and her blind younger sister, Nellie Ann. Monroe is proud of his turpentine business and the group of workers that labor and live in his woods, but his wife and daughters find him coarse and unbearable when he drinks. An honorable but flawed man, Monroe tries to make amends to his family for a mistake made long ago. When Dalia discovers what this mistake is, her ambivalence toward her father turns to hate, and her actions further splinter the family. Eventually, Dalia finds herself alone and all but penniless, and she believes the only solution to her situation is to find a wealthy man to marry, though this does not lead to either the happiness or the stability she craves. Anchored by several complex, intricately drawn characters, Rubio's novel paints a rich portrait of the late-nineteenth-century South.
Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, author of Come and Go, Molly Snow and How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos
“This is a big, raw-boned, brave novel, illuminated by an inclusive, clear-sighted humanity. These characters seem as remote and extravagant as characters in the Odyssey, and at the same time as immediate and recognizable as our own grandparents and wildest family legends. Rubio has brought an energetic, passionate, and generous imagination to the telling of their haunting story.”
Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies
“The Woodsman's Daughter is a vivid, intense triptych of a family's dreams and dramas over three generations. Rubio has a special feeling for the subtle dynamics of class and race and marriage in the haunting pine country of south Georgia over the past century. This story of community and kinship and land across time is wonderfully real, moving, and unforgettable.”
Silas House, author of The Coal Tattoo and A Parchment of Leaves
"The Woodsman’s Daughter is so fine and beautiful that it becomes a completely transporting experience for the reader. This is an old-fashioned epic in only all the best possible ways. Entrancing and sprawling, this book is thick with the powerful storytelling that creates not only a whole world for us but also presents one of the most memorable heroines I have ever encountered. Every word is perfectly chosen and every sentence is a beauty."
Praise for Icy Sparks:
Fred Chappell, poet and novelist
"This grand novel knocked me on my teakettle. It is at birth a classic of Appalachian literature and I think it will take its shining place in American literature.... What a grand person Icy Sparks is! The pages of this novel seem to turn themselves as the narrative glides gracefully from sorrow to sorrow, from joy to joy. Gwyn Hyman Rubio is a marvelous writer. Too grateful to envy, I admire and applaud her triumph and hope that everyone will share it with me.”
Barnes & Noble, Discover Great New Writers
"The influence of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers is evident in Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s remarkable debut novel.... A lesson of tolerance and respect is learned by all who meet Icy, and her enchanting spirit will touch even the hardest of hearts.”
The New York Times Book Review
"Rubio is a writer of uncommonly warm and tender vision, often comic, brimming with love and hope...an entertaining and absorbing story.”
Francine Prose, author of Hunters and Gatherers
"Icy Sparks speaks to us in an entirely new voice, painfully wise and wonderfully peculiar. In her original first novel, Gwyn Rubio makes us see that the tics and noises her remarkable heroine can’t suppress are the pure expressions of a brave and lively spirit.”
Gurney Norman, author of Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories
"A most original work of fiction. Icy Sparks is an important contribution to the literature that helps us know the emotional realities of wounded people. It is also one of the few novels of the Appalachian region that goes beyond the description of external reality and places the reader in direct touch with the interior lives of its characters. Brilliant.”
Stephen Dobyns, author of The Church of Dead
"Gwyn Hyman Rubio twists together her dark and comic visions to create a world so marvelous and strange that it takes one’s breath. Her subject is the entanglements of order and disorder in a rural Kentucky setting of the 1950s, and she turns them upside down in a way that challenges our own definitions of where and how we live. She is an extraordinary writer.”
Publisher’s Weekly
"Sensative...funny...remarkable!”
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