BOOK REVIEW: Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson

Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson is a grand, sprawling, multi-family, multi-generational epic set in contemporary rural North Carolina.

Rand Jefferson Lee is a retired army colonel who is embittered about life. He has moved to a retirement community at his wife’s request. She is active and sociable, while he simply wants to be left alone. His only real activities are running (to bring on a second heart attack) and dwelling on his plans to leave her a well–provided for widow. His plans fail when she is the one to die suddenly.

Joylene is a youngish widow with a late-teenage son with Down Syndrome. She owns a goat dairy farm and hard-scrabble garden. Actually, the bank owns it and she is desperate to hold onto it so she can continue to care for her son. But the mortgage needs to be paid and she just can’t keep up.

Reba is an elderly Black woman with native blood whose people at one time populated the whole area. She is the last of her line, after a meth-addled white man killed her niece. Now, she is fostering the killer’s troubled young teenage son because her niece loved the boy, and he has no one else. Reba also has second-sight and communes with spirits, adding a touch of magical realism.

Reba and Joylene are friends, even though Reba has had nothing but pain and suffering from the white people she encounters. This now includes Rand, who smacked into her old rusting car while he was running and looking at his phone. She feels he should pay to fix the dent. He feels she is at fault and is just after his money.

The characters all have deep, dark secrets. The book is permeated with grief and loss. It takes a cataclysmic storm to bring everything out into the open in this immersive, ultimately redemptive novel.