Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jeffrey J. Folks

Critical Review by Jeffrey J. Folks

SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. Review of Feather Crowns, by Bobbie Ann Mason. World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 569.

In the following review, Folks offers a positive assessment of the writing and characterizations in Feather Crowns.

In Feather Crowns Bobbie Ann Mason traces the life of Christianna Wilburn Wheeler or “Christie,” a young farm woman in western Kentucky who gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America. Mason's historical fiction, which is inspired from an actual event but creates a wholly fictionalized community and richly detailed setting, succeeds admirably in telling “a life story” with realism and balance. In first-person narration, Mason reveals a woman whose ordinary life is transformed by a unique event. Driven by curiosity and by her insistence on keeping her heart alive, Christie triumphs by stubbornly preserving her selfhood within a world in which she, as a relatively poor, uneducated...
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