Oxford S. Stroud
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 332
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Oxford Stroud's To Yield a Dream is a novel richly suffused with the aura of myth. On the realistic level it is the story of the maturing of its hero, Jody, who in the end discovers love and the confident manhood that prepares him to depart Hurricane Island (symbolically named) for the mainland where his destiny lies. This preparation furnishes the substance of the story, in which Jody is initiated into the enduring and entangled mysteries of love, death, art, and time. These mysteries are played out through many, and basically mythic, characters that inhabit his youthful world. There are wonders along the way, rhetorical and otherwise. There is Johnny Revelation, the exotic evangelist, whose fantastic fictional rendering demonstrates the spectacular, indeed all but outrageous, eloquence of the author. And there is Jo Anne, the young and greatly gifted painter, whose work, as described, produces what seem to this writer strikingly original insights into the painter's art. Indeed, "original" is the precise word to describe this complex and deeply imaginative novel. But I would add the neologism "Stroudian" for those familiar with the author's earlier work.