5146340
9780786719877
Meet the citizens of Humble County. There's used-car dealer Jimmy Wiggins, who believes cars are evolving into fish; hard-bitten but motherly Daisy, whose outlaw diner sits on the border of and outside the jurisdiction of three dry counties; long-winded Mr. Moss, who never recovered from the loss of his golden retriever; Ruby Mulvaney, falling apart piece by piece, as if she were made of leftover parts; Mr. Thigpen, a foot-washing Baptist out to save people's souls whether they like it or not; and a host of other irresistible characters. At the center is Earl Mulvaney, a high school dropout and mechanical genius hopelessly in love with the girl next door and miserably alone when his father leaves and his mother dies. Earl's sweetheart learns she's pregnant with someone else's baby, and things being what they are in 1970s Georgia, she must marry the father. As the folks of Humble County rally around Earl to help him piece his life together, he undertakes an improbable, some say impossible, quest: by saving the leftover parts accumulated repairing and maintaining Jimmy Wiggins's classic '53 Corvette, he'll build a whole new car and still leave the original behind. Amid magical local color and in those twilight moments of childlike wonder, Man Martin makes us believe that Earl Just might get the girl, and the car.Martin, Man is the author of 'Days of the Endless Corvette ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780786719877 and ISBN 0786719877.
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