COMPASSION AND REDEMPTION
IN A "GRIM AND GRITTY PLACE"
"An altogether welcome work with a terrific grip on the English language."
--Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1999
"The reader is compelled to enter the author's microcosm, a milieu composed of the hard details that make a fictional world come alive on the page. This is a grim and gritty place, but the fine prose casts a grace over it that is redeeming. In Jacko Lee, Dailey has dramatized the bitter suffering of a charming innocent, and readers will take heart in his successful struggle to find a peace he so richly deserves."
--Gordon Weaver
The Yellow Ribbon Snake, J.R. Dailey's debut novel, is about hard times and struggle--physical, mental, and emotional. At the center is a homeless vet named Jacko Lee, a simple-minded man who was sexually abused by his mother and shellshocked by the Vietnam War. He has come back to the desert cross-roads where he grew up, to live in a makeshift box and to try to understand his past.
Jacko does not feel sorry for himself. He has surrounded himself with friends, an odd assortment including a drifter named Sonny Ray, a hooker named Darla, a corpse named Pitts, and a spider named Norton. These friends, who give Jacko strength, are not as strong as he is, and they move on in various ways, hanging themselves off overpasses, getting shot in parking lots, or wandering off to Kansas. But Jacko remains, determined to solve the (murder) mystery of his past and find the keys to his redemption.
Jacko's main support, the one he'd sometimes rather do without, is his older half-sister, Marie. Marie, whose manner is as scrappy as the Arizona desert, whose heart is as tough as Jacko's is soft. She will fight with anyone to defend her brother, sometimes neglecting her own need for love and tenderness.
The Yellow Ribbon Snake is about danger and death, sex and murder, abuse and insanity. But in spite of this rough road, it is a book about love and compassion, full of humor and wisdom. It is also the first novel of a writer whose gift for dialogue and storytelling are apparent on every page.
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