The river is home ; and, Angel city

the long version

Anyone who has read A Land Remembered, Patrick Smith's simple and compelling Florida historical novel, wants to find other novels by this extraordinary storyteller. Pineapple Press has responded by bringing back into print Patrick Smith's earlier novels in "readers," each with two novels in one volume. The first Patrick Smith reader offered Forever Island and Allapattah, and was eagerly welcomed. This second reader pairs two novels that offer quite a contrast in setting and topic, but they share a theme common to all of Smith's writing: the struggle of common people to live off the land. The River is Home is the story of Skeeter, a young boy growing up in a Louisiana family poor in material goods but rich in the appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river--with its food supply, floods, steamboats--figures strongly in their lives as the source of life and death. The River is Home met with critical acclaim and launched Patrick Smith into his career as a novelist. Angel City follows the course of the Teeters, a West Virginia family come to Florida to better their lives. What they find is degradation in a migrant labor camp. Though it is repellant to believe, Smith's depiction of conditions in Florida migrant labor camps as late as the seventies was based on fact. His expose of those camps in Angel City served its intended purpose: to bring about change. As interest increases in the novels of Patrick Smith, literary historians are sure to place this near the top rank of his output.