SOURCE: Clark, Michele. “Signs and Portents.” Women's Review of Books 11, no. 6 (March 1994): 19.

In the following review, Clark examines Mason's skillful use of details in Feather Crowns.

Most of Feather Crowns takes place in 1900, at a time when rural preachers are predicting apocalypse and in a place where people discover signs of God's will in everything from meteor showers to “the way a pair of birds sat on a branch.” Many people believe an earthquake will happen on the New Year; at “the dawn of the new century,” it will herald the Last Judgment.

Instead, Christie Wheeler, a young wife and mother who lives outside Hopewell, Kentucky, gives birth to healthy quintuplets. Hopewell's mayor proclaims the births “the eighth wonder of the world,” and the town's preachers declare them a sign of something good, perhaps the Second Coming. The extended Wheeler household of tobacco farmers quickly becomes a magnet...