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THE CURIOUS CALLING OF LEONARD BUSH

Susan Gregg Gilmore

Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel.

When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic eventsupending the lives of Leonard's rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening.

Susan Gilmore's love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She's the daughter of a revival preacher's son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a "homespun Pilgrim's Progress."

Susan Gregg Gilmore is the author of the seminal coming-of-age novel Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, as well as The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

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Book Published 2025-08-01 by Blair

Comments

Humorous, heartfelt, and sometimes harrowing, Gilmore introduces us to a compelling cast of characters and a community built on a system of give-and-take. At the center of it all is young Leonard, his early loss a transforming lesson to everyone around him.

Each fully developed character has a role to play in this moving and unusual novel, a homespun Pilgrim's Progress set at a dairy farm on Big Sugar River in East Tennessee in 1961. When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events is set in motion, inevitable as the dire judgment of the local Primitive Baptist Church. Leonard's rigid, God-fearing mother, June; his secret-bearing father, Emmett; Leonard's best friend, Azalea, and her troubled mother, Rose, the local whore, are only the protagonists in a story played out by the entire community. Gilmore knows how to move the suspenseful events right along to its brilliant and moving conclusion. A big, generous novel, a really good read.

When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events is set in motion. Gilmore knows how to move the suspenseful events right along to its brilliant and moving conclusion.

By turns sweet, deepest-dark, hilarious, poignant, grotesque, thrilling, and oh-so-human.The indomitable Southern spirit climbing mountains then tumbling down, then climbing once more, all with one leg. Like Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine., here is a book of the South, from a writer who knows the territory as William Faulkner, with a cast of characters as eccentric and individual as those in As I Lay Dying, but all the more human here.