The Further Adventures of Ociee Nash

2009, Bell Bridge Books
Review by Debra Louise Scott

It is an endearing idea to write a book based on the memory of an ancestor’s tales and I love that Propst wanted to recapture the stories she must have heard at her grandmother’s knee.  As I read, I could imagine Grandma Ociee laughing about all her adventure’s, embroidering and revising to suit the ears of her young grandchildren. But that is also what the book sounds like: a long string of disconnected stories of far more interest to someone in the family than to today’s hyper multi-tasking youths.

The “Adventures” read like a young girl’s diary, with no sense of plot or purpose, Even in a setting that seems taken from Little House on the Prairie there should be more than sweet sugar days and blueberry pie dinners.

The writing is uneven, switching inexplicably from folksy to static; “For a time, our brother clean forgot how to have any fun. At the same time, his passion for trains intensified” or the sudden change in Ociee’s speech to include the colloquial “yawl” halfway through.

Some passages are left hanging, without explanation; “I was sniffling. Ben was hollering. Papa stood up with his hands held high over his head. I thought about the picture of Moses in my Sunday school book, the one where Moses parts the Red Sea.” The chapter ends with no further detail as to why Papa was holding his hands up like that.

Nevertheless, there are some very nice passages, such as, “For us Nashes, our lives either dragged slow as cold honey or fast as lightening flashes. Reading my journal, I saw that during the past two years we’d turned from honey people into a thunderbolt family.”

The “witch woman” episode had at least some suspense in its development, and a bit of sibling discord. Sweet Ociee almost immediately distinguished the person from the stereotype which put her at odds with her older brother.

I imagine that this would appeal to families who choose to shelter their children away from the dangers of things like public school and television. It presents an ideal vision of childhood, precocious, mischievous but nearly always obedient with a sweet interpretation of adults as always helpful, always wise, and always good