Odell’s childhood in small-town Mississippi and participation in the Civil Rights movement gave him a full well of memories to draw upon for his debut novel. A View From Delphi opens with Hazel Ishee, the young daughter of a white Mississippi farmer, seeing a photograph of herself for the first time and discovering that she is ugly, sickly, and poor. She dedicates herself to living a life more beautiful, and the plot churns through the hideous, bitterly ironic, and, yes, somehow also beautiful social turmoil of the South in the sixties.
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