Book Review: Scarred

Title: Scarred 

Author: Roe Braddy

Date: 2020

Publisher: Amazon

Quote: "There would  be no fraternizing with anyone of the opposite sex on Sundays--especially a boy like Edward Proctor...that finds it fit to work on Sundays."

Yes. The United States' Great Depression lingered even after the war in some areas, such as the part of Alabama where this story takes place. Even a middle-class family's life was anything but the stuff of which Harlequin or Hollywood "romances" were made. For a really poor family like these fictional Proctors, not only did poverty seem inescapable, not only did some people's frustration turn into violence, but neighbors who might have helped them judged them instead. 

Ed works when and where he can, and Mavis quietly, discreetly, notices his muscles. Mavis's mother wishes Mavis liked somebody more upscale, but the older man who "could almost pass for White" is quietly, discreetly homosexual and the preacher Mavis's mother would love to claim for a son-in-law is a real creep. Mavis could only have gone to public school, so she must have met other boys besides Ed, but none of them stands out in her memory. She has a general idea that Ed's father is abusive, as well as poor, but that only makes Ed's good intentions seem more impressive to her.

They've had enough of a modest, even Victorian, friendship for Mavis's mother to have ordered Mavis to be "cordial, but no more," when she meets Ed in town. Then Ed disappears. Mavis wonders if he's lost interest. Ed tells us up front what he's ashamed to tell Mavis through most of the story: he lost patience and hit his father back, and his father deliberately scarred his face with a knife. He's been told he's ugly because he has a dark complexion. Now, with a deep infected wound on his face, he believes it.

But Mavis still cares about him, and the way she shows it gets both of them packed off to Pittsburgh to marry each other or not--so long as they don't come home. 

The romance genre has historically shied away from real poverty, despite the popularity of "Cinderella." Poverty is not romantic. Rich characters are romantic, or, at most, middle-class characters who are so brave and so cute that readers/viewers can imagine that, if they don't marry for money, they'll earn some in a few years--the young doctor struggling to pay off loans, the teacher with the disabled parents and younger siblings to support. Roe Braddy convinces us that really poor young people can be romantic, too, in a different way. No chocolates or candlelight in this short novel--when food is mentioned, it's authentic period dishes readers will probably find a gross-out--but they're still "in love" and they'll still live more or less happily ever after.

Apart from Mavis's mother's belief that everyone needs to go to church every Sunday, Ed and Mavis are Christians, themselves. They perceive it as God, though they're told that it's a friendly porter, who seats a midwife with medical supplies in her bag near them on a train. They pray. This novel would trigger Christian-phobics...and, although nobody evangelizes in the book, rightly so. It portrays Christians living up to the best standards of their faith tradition.