Title: A Homicide in Hooker’s Point
Author: Gloria Taylor Weinberg
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN: 1469142449
Pages: 224
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
It’s no surprise that A Homicide in Hooker’s Point won a 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers’ Association and was the 2015 North Street Book Prize winner for mainstream and literary fiction. Gloria Taylor Weinberg, the book’s author, writes like an angel and stings like a bee. A homicide serves as the nidus of a stunning cast of characters and dialogue and setting in this very memorable book.
Weinberg’s novel takes the everyday lives and sorrows of 1950s Hooker’s Point, Florida, and as only literary fiction can do, distills the characters’ blood, sweat and tears into art, feeling and transcendence.
The book opens with gratuitous violence – a kitten is sent flying through a screen door by an abusive and very drunk man. Eight-year-old Victoria Leigh Bayle is as much a victim as her pet kitten, except that Vicki actually lives to see the sordid tale unfold. During one tumultuous weekend, splattered with blood and racial intolerance and sexual violence, everything is brought to a head in this Lake Okeechobee community. In one fell swoop the best and worst of humanity are revealed.
The place is rife with violence and abuse. Living and work conditions are subsistence level at best, and Vicki’s family barely scrapes by. A hurricane takes thousands of lives and ravages the land. Incest and child sexual abuse are pandemic. This is Grapes of Wrath and Deliverance, served up Florida 1950s style. The plot and the dialogue are so apposite, so cinematic – the book would not be out of place on the big screen.
Weinberg is a master storyteller and she has masterfully captured the tone and temper of that time. Weinberg has lived in Fort Pierce, Florida for almost 50 years and delivers dialect, humor and her characters’ ultimately triumphant humanity from one telling phrase to the next. Her use of language is original, as fresh and ebullient as some of the characters themselves. Her metaphors are likewise original and apt – from one page to the next the reader will pause to reflect, Hmm, what an interesting way to look at it…Why didn’t I think of that?
‘Men make plans, and God laughs.’ That is the essence of tragedy. Gloria Taylor Weinberg captures this essence – in the random visitations of violence, of the wrath of nature, of poverty and unemployment, and finally of murder – and transmogrifies them in the ultimately heroic and movable feast of a little girl who won’t back down.