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**Winner of the 2004 Minnesota Book Award in Fiction**
New! - Online
Book Review
Sheila
O'Connor tells the compelling story of Faina McCoy, a young girl caught in a
perilous scheme of elaborate lies created for her own harrowing system of survival.
Enmeshed in a tangled family web, Faina is abruptly uprooted against her will
from her father and finds herself half a continent away on the doorstep of a
mother who abandoned her years before – but who can't live without Faina
now. Alone, persecuted, and exploited, Faina must fend for herself as she searches
for love and answers, navigating the streets of a strange city and forging bonds
of feeling with liars and outlaws.
Where No Gods Came is a powerful look at assimilation and resilience and the
sacrifices we all make to adapt. It's a potent reminder, too, of the tenacity
and courage required of fragile families who endure on the edge.
Faina McCoy triumphs as an unlikely — and unforgettable — heroine,
a stubborn child who will survive to tell the tale.
Purchase this book at:
Praise for Where No Gods Came…
The
Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
When her father's gambling debts compel him to leave for an oil rig in the South
Pacific, 12-year-old Faina McCoy is plucked from the only life she's known.
Leaving beachside San Diego, she's sent to inner-city Minneapolis to live for
a year with the mother who abandoned her and a mysteriously absent older sister.
A diarist and introvert, Faina is poorly prepared for the life that awaits her.
Her mother, a bedridden alcoholic, and Cammie, her pretty blonde sister, are
just the start of her troubles. But mix in a pinch of nosy neighbors, a cup
of socially aggressive schoolmates, and a handful of pesky administrators at
her new Catholic school, and the outcome is a novel to stir even the coldest
heart.
The Discover program's mission is finding hidden treasures like this. Through
the alternating voices of her characters, O'Connor's debut novel moves, evokes,
and delights. With character studies reminiscent of James Baldwin's masterwork
Go Tell It on the Mountain, O'Connor suffuses her imagined world with such feeling
that readers live the pages more than read them. A flawlessly nuanced work of
fiction with a steadily increasing intensity, Where No Gods Came is a brilliant
work of storytelling -- and what we hope is just the beginning of a long, artful
career. (Fall 2003 Selection)
". . . a touching odyssey of a girl poised between the emotional abyss and the reader's heart." Minneapolis Star and Tribune
". . . a fresh and moving coming-of-age novel, a memorable portrait of the artist a scrawny young girl. . . . Faina is a fairy-tale heroine, the dark haired younger sister exiled in an alien land, unwanted, dressed in her sister's discarded granny gowns and cracked-vinyl boots, consigned not to sweeping cinders exactly but to scrubbing her mother's puke in a dingy apartment. If Where No Gods Came is a kind of fairy tale, it's the real thing, as told by Grimm not Disney, full of real menace, sharp edges and rough corners, strangeness and, ultimately, the possibility of grace. It's a story about the power of love and guts and imagination to sustain a skinny kid in a hard world." Buffalo News:--Mike Cochrane, Author of Flesh Wounds and Sport
Since infancy, Faina McCoy has lived with her father in San Diego. Then, when she is barely teenaged, her debt-ridden father must take an oil-rig job off Australia's coast, and Faina is sent to Minneapolis to live with her mother, Lenore, and older sister, Cammy. The neurotic and alcoholic Lenore is incapable of parenting, and Faina must instead nurture her mother while coping in a new and hostile environment. Told in alternating voices, this is a poignant tale of childhood ended abruptly and the discovery of a new and stronger self. Sisters Faina and Cammy are complex, wonderfully drawn characters who burst from the pages and enthrall the reader. Cammy's tough exterior belies the nurturing older sister, and, in Faina, O'Connor effectively captures the naiveté of the child and the burgeoning perceptiveness of the teenager. The relationship between the sisters is the soul of the novel, as they journey from loathing to loyalty and love. Written with precision and perception, this is a highly recommended work from a writer to watch.-Caroline M. Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. Library Journal
Above
all Where No Gods Came is a novel about resiliency and hope; that at the end
of all the darkness, personal courage and trust prevail; that grace is a story
of transcendence, in whatever limited human form it may take; and that for every
Faina of our world, there are a hundred more—girls of fierce intelligence
and determination stuck in unfortunate circumstances. It is a story for our
time.
Three Candles, Steve Mueske, Editor
Click Here for Full
Review
I liked the intimacy of the characters, especially Faina and her father. Their tender letters give hope in the face of her forlorn circumstances. The way Faina is absorbed into her mother's paranoid world is frightening and realistic. Minnesotans may feel our state is a bit maligned, but will enjoy the local color." -- Book Sense, Laura L. Hansen, Bookin' It, Little Falls, MN
Where No Gods
Came accomplishes that difficult thing: it's a
coherent story about incoherence, a shapely one about the lures of
shapelessness. The various voices ring true. Ms. O'Connor writes of
family and love and loss and youth at risk and hard-earned pleasure; she
does so with a noticing eye and tone-perfect ear. Her sense of the
landscape here described--both actual and metaphorical--is keen, and her
language self-assured. This is a fine, fierce book.
Nicholas Delbanco; Michigan Literary Award judge ;In the Name of Mercy; Old
Scores; What Remains
For a single
mother of three, and a writer who reads countless books a year, to stay up most
of the night to finish a novel means it must be a heck of a story: and Sheila
O'Connor's novel was, so compelling in the landscape of urban hardscrabble Minneapolis,
and the interior horizons of a damaged mother and her two daughters trying to
build their own fable of a family. Fervent and despairing and truth-hard, this
novel kept me spellbound, hurtling toward a hoped-for redemption.
Susan Straight, Highwire Moon
In Where No
Gods Came, Sheila O'Connor fearlessly takes us inside a family long past the
breaking point, reminding us of the power of love, the pain of separation, and
introducing me to one of the most compelling young women I've met in a long
time. Resilient, vulnerable and with a heart as big as they come, Faina McCoy
will break your heart. I didn't want her story to end.
David Haynes, All American Dream Dolls, Live at Five and Somebody Else's Mama.
"Sheila O'Connor's beautifully readable novel about young girls living close to the precipice is truthful, tough and filled with delicate hope. She shows how we all survive by inches, by grace." --Maureen Gibbon, Swimming Sweet Arrow
Sheila
O’Connor’s protagonist, Faina McCoy, is sure to take her place among
a long list of unforgettable adolescent heroines – Scout Finch, Jane Eyre,
Jo March, Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright Frankie Adams, Sula Peace, Kate Vaiden
– all of them smart, gutsy girls whose strong hearts capture the reader’s
own. Where No Gods Came is an unflinchingly true and real portrait of a family;
the deep and myriad ways in which people hurt and are hurt by each other; and
the capacity in the human spirit to love and endure.
Mary Francois Rockcastle, Rainy Lake
This is a beautifully
written story about the ways in which people find the strength to move on—physically,
emotionally and spiritually. Long after the last page is turned, you’ll
find yourself thinking about the people who have graced them. Faina’s
strength stays with me. Jacqueline Woodson, Autobiography of a Family Photo