From the Publisher
On a stormy night in 1965, a man carrying a suitcase holding army discharge papers and a Bronze Star strode into the little town of Citrus, Florida, and changed everything. He called himself Sanders Collier and said he was the son of a prominent family of South Carolina gentry. He was handsome and cunning, and people believed him.
Within a few years he would be dead, shot in what would always be called a hunting accident. Who was hunting what was never clear to his son, left behind to make sense of a town split apart by the things his father had done. But when Roy grows into the spitting image of his father, the unspoken agreement to keep buried the old resentments about the past comes undone.
What follows for this family is the unraveling of every lie, half-truth, self-delusion, and wishful thought on which they had built their lives since the arrival of Sanders Collier. Only after the selfless sacrifice of one very odd, profane, saintly man does Roy finally understand what happened the night his father died.
Set in the lush, fertile world of the Florida panhandle, WAITING FOR APRIL is a complex, funny, sometimes dark story. When the Oxford American said Scott Morris's first book was a harbinger of even greater things, this is the book they were talking about.
The Los Angeles Times
Waiting for April is a contagious novel, drawing readers into the mystery of Sanders' background as it plays out in the lives of all in Citrus. — Bernadette Murphy
Publishers Weekly
Sanders Royce Collier arrives in the backwater Florida panhandle town of Citrus on Christmas Eve, 1965, to the accompaniment of portentous thunder and lightning. This second novel by Morris (The Total View of Taftly) is narrated by Sanders's teenage son, Roy, who pieces together the history of his father's fateful entanglement with Citrus's Lanier family. Sanders arrived saying he was a South Carolina blueblood recently discharged from Vietnam. He made a splash in the humble town, marrying a local woman named June Lanier. June had social aspirations and was proud of Sanders's supposedly distinguished background, but Sanders soon fell in love with her stunning younger sister, April, who, though sensitive and spirited, was resolutely trailer trash. Less than 10 years after he came to town, Sanders died in what everyone called a hunting accident. Roy, who was seven when his father died, doesn't know about any of this, but he himself develops an infatuation with April. His alarmed family tries to head off disaster by telling him about Sanders's obsession, which involves startling and ugly revelations about Sanders's true identity and his death. There is no shortage of plot twists, though the retrospective narration tends to flatten the drama. More compromising is that April, the novel's fulcrum, whose beauty and charm are frequently reiterated, never quite comes to life. In general, Morris does too much telling and not enough showing when it comes to his characters' development, and the novel suffers for it in spite of his fine ear for prose and dialogue. (Mar. 28) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Growing up in a small Florida town where one's father was killed under questionable circumstances, where everyone is glad he's gone, and where no one wants to talk about it is a daunting task that no boy should face. Roy Collier has only a few vivid memories of his father, Sanders-specifically of his flirting with his wife's teenaged sister, April. Fortunately, Roy's Aunt April and Uncle Leonard, along with a doting mother, are there to guide him through his childhood and teenage years. Despite his early death, Sanders has a profound effect on his son. The family's reluctance to talk about him piques Roy's curiosity, while stories gleaned from friends prove unsatisfying, and neither the private nor the public image of Sanders matches Roy's memories. The result is a complex story of growing up in a dysfunctional family held together by secrets and lies, guilt and resentment, love and dependence, but most of all grit. Morris (The Total View of Taftly) has written a wonderfully sensual story in the eloquent, understated style that readers have come to expect from Southern writers. Recommended for most public libraries and Southern fiction collections.-Thomas L. Kilpatrick, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The Mississippi author's second (The Total View of Taftly, 2000) is a complicated, intense coming-of-ager centered on an infatuation seemingly passed from father to son, doing neither of them much good-especially father, who winds up mysteriously dead. Roy is young when his drunken daddy, Sanders, drifts out of their house on the Florida Panhandle one night and winds up shot to death, but Dad's patrician memory is kept alive by June, Roy's mother. The fatal attraction for Sanders was June's lithe and lovely younger sister April, also their next-door neighbor, for whom he'd carried a flame ever since he first blew into town in 1965, fresh from Vietnam. And after Sanders's death, when June becomes preoccupied with the political fortunes of a local congressman, Roy goes increasingly to his aunt for company and comfort. From their trailer, April and her hard-drinking husband Leonard raise Roy in the country way his mother so despises: from April he learns to fish; from Leonard, a former star running back, he learns football. Under Leonard's tutelage, Roy becomes an unstoppable force on the playing field, but as he grows up, his feelings for April become ever more frustrated. June and Leonard, sensing a replay of Sanders's unhealthy fixation, work to warn Roy off, but not even being thrown through the window of the trailer by Leonard deters him. Finally, when Roy opts to play ball at nearby Florida State instead of a college worthy of Sanders, a vengeful June forces Leonard to check into a rehab program and April to go to a battered women's home. Roy rescues his aunt and, in New Orleans, drunk and liberated, they resolve the tension between them. They return home, and Roy goes off to college;in time, he learns the full story of Sanders and what happened to him. Surviving the family whammy, Roy garners sympathy, yet he never quite comes into his own as a character. Author tour
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