Book Review: Sweeping Up Glass

Sweeping up glass is a dangerous business. Even if you didn't break it, you can still get cut.

There's a lot of cleaning up to do in Sweeping Up Glass, Carolyn Wall's gritty, vitally alive first novel. It roars into life on the first page and never lets up. Someone is killing and mutilating wolves up on Cooper's Ridge, and bitter, scarred old Olivia is going to settle the score. As a child, Olivia adored living with her father, Tate Harker, a self-taught veterinarian who ran a small-time grocery store as well as a whiskey still on the side. Their property on Cooper's Ridge, at the end of Farm Road One, is in the little town of Aurora, Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee line.

In a world where coloreds and whites shop on different days and stand on separate sides of the graveyard, Olivia longs to be colored because of the warmth and love of the neighboring Hanley family. But her happy, freedom-filled childhood comes to an abrupt end when Olivia's mother, Ida, returns home from the mental hospital. Hate-filled, iron-willed, bible-thumping Ida turns her daughter's life into a hellish fight for survival. And things get worse when her father refuses to bring any more liquor to the Phelps boys, because of the ugly little thing they're doing out at their place on Saturday nights.

Now a gray-haired Olivia, brutally broken by life, still believing the lies she's been told as a child, lives only to raise her devoted 11-year-old grandson, Will'm, and to protect the lives of the silver-striped wolves, the sole wolves in Kentucky. Whoever is shooting the silver-faces up on her property and cutting off each victim's right ear is going to find Olivia waiting for him.

Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, Sweeping Up Glass is profoundly moving and impossible to read dry-eyed, with one thrilling sequence after another going off like a chain of firecrackers, not to mention plenty of surprises and reversals, subtle set-ups with genuine payoffs, dozens of delightful secondary characters (Junk Hanley, Love Alice, Booger Phelps) and a brave, honest woman at the heart of the story like Olivia Harker Cross whom you love passionately and worry about until the last page.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A gritty first novel, hilarious and heartbreaking, about a woman's fight to save the lives of Kentucky wolves and raise her grandson.