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Chicago Tribune -- January 18, 2004 --
Seeking escape from a wretched family existence --
By Beth Kephart. --
The Turtle Warrior -- By Mary Relindes Ellis --
Viking, 368 pages, $24.95 --
First-time novelist Mary Relindes Ellis has written autobiographically of
a childhood spent in northern Wisconsin beside working-class immigrants
and Native Americans, storytellers and scrappers, an "irresponsible
and violent alcoholic" father, a damaged brother who served in
Vietnam and a river that was home to snapping turtles. She has written
about being haunted by the wars that begin at home...
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San Francisco Chronicle -- Sunday January 11, 2004
-- Rage and regret in small-town Wisconsin -- Reviewed by June
Sawyers -- The Turtle Warrior -- by Mary Relindes Ellis -- VIKING;
368 PAGES; $24.95 -- In the background notes to "The Turtle
Warrior,'' Mary Relindes Ellis' luminous debut novel, she offers a
telling insight: War, she writes, begins at home. Violence has to
start somewhere, and that somewhere, unfortunately, is usually among
familiar sights and familiar people. The Lucas farm that is the
setting of the novel is in an isolated area of northern Wisconsin,
where, for generations, people -- mostly working-class German
immigrants and members of the Ojibwe tribe -- had learned to get by
with very little...
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BookSense 76 pick for January-February 2004 -- THE
TURTLE WARRIOR, by Mary Relindes Ellis (Viking, $24.95, 0670032654)
"After his older brother leaves for Vietnam, Bill Lucas must
find ways to survive his alcoholic father's abuse and his mother's
slow descent into mental illness. A mix of characters narrate Ellis'
amazing first novel...
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Publishers Weekly -- December 1, 2003 -- THE
TURTLE WARRIORr -- Ellis, Mary Relindes -- ISBN:
0-67-003265-4 -- Viking Books -- Hardcover $24.95 -- 2004/01-- This
sensitive, melancholic first novel by Midwestern short story writer
Ellis probes the troubled heart of a Wisconsin farm family. John
Lucas is a subsistence farmer and an abusive alcoholic feared by his
wife and his children, James and Bill. In 1967, 18-year-old Jimmy,
who slicks his hair into a pompadour and plays pranks on gentle
eight-year-old Bill, enlists in the Marines, intending, in part, to
prove something to the brutal father who'd lied about his own
military service...
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