The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall Narrated by Scott Shina

Overview

This astonishing novel was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly and Newsweek. Contained within is the story of Edgar Mint, the half-Apache, mostly orphaned child who overcomes a serious childhood injury to embark on a life of tragedies, including a boarding school for Native Americans and a dysfunctional Mormon foster family.

Editorial Reviews

Tony Earley

If Dickens had been born in Arizona, he might have written a book like this.

Melanie Rae Thon

Wild, inventive, hilarious, and heart-breaking...full of delights for the spirit and the senses.

William Kittredge

A new generation of writers is emerging from the West, and Brady Udall is one of the very best of them.

Clyde Edgerton

Brady Udall has got what it takes.

Junot Diaz

A story that tears at you and calls you back.

Elle

[An] ingenious tale, which takes its heart from Dickens and its soul from America's great outlaw West.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-With Dickensian flair and mastery, Udall gives readers an underdog child protagonist, surrounds him with a cast of half-funny and half-tragic characters, and immerses them all in a plot full of staggering setbacks and occasional, hard-won moments of peace. When his head is crushed by a mail truck at age seven, Edgar is left for dead by his alcoholic, disinterested mother, who doesn't stick around to learn that he is later "brought back" by a shady doctor and whisked away to a hospital to recuperate. Some months and several delightfully cantankerous roommates later, Edgar regains all functions but the ability to write, which is more than solved when a fellow patient gets him a typewriter. Typing soothes the boy and becomes necessary therapy when he is released to an Indian school where other students punish him horrifically for being a "half-breed" (Apache and white). He is saved, literally and figuratively, by a pair of missionaries who recruit and place him with a Mormon family in a Utah suburb. Now that he feels relatively safe, the protagonist finds himself with a new purpose: to track down the devastated mailman who feels responsible for his death and let him know that he's alive and fine. Yet his sense of safety remains merely relative, as the disbarred doctor surfaces repeatedly in his life, full of menacing, disturbing love and determined to raise Edgar as his own son. This novel is a wonderful, wise debut, with a strong story told in language that teens will find easy to embrace.-Emily Lloyd, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A picaresque, coming-of-ager by Udall (stories: Letting Loose the Hounds, 1997) invokes nearly every archetype of the genre while still managing to be fresh and vigorous, and unveiling a rarely seen slice of American life in the process. Edgar's Apache mother had her first drink the day she gave birth to him, on an Arizona reservation, and was never again sober. And his white father split seven months before. So life's looking pretty bleak until the now-seven-year-old gets his head run over by the mailman's jeep, surviving the first in a series of miracles. When he wakes up three months later, he's not just gaining consciousness—little Edgar is being born into a whole new life. St. Divine's Hospital, with its infrequent attention and even more infrequent love, provides Edgar with a family that's a huge improvement over his biological one. With echoes of Dickens, Edgar meets the stock characters who will reappear throughout his life. It can take a bit to get accustomed to the unique, alternating voices—an intimate, poignant, humorous first-person and a well-paced third—but, ultimately, it's wonderfully successful. From the hospital, Edgar is shipped to the William Tecumseh Sherman School, a Native American reformatory sure to rival any fictional institution for cruelty and deprivation. Despite this, though, the boy never quite loses the comic edge that lends his story its buoyancy. Edgar eventually manages to get placed with a Mormon family—on loan from some John Irving tale—complete with a genius stepbrother, a sexy stepsister, and an adulterous stepmom. Somewhere along the way he's decided that his life mission is to find that mailman in the jeep who wasthe prime mover behind all this: he wants to let the guy know he's just fine. This quest, which sends the teenaged Edgar from Utah across the country, leads to a close as unexpected as it is heartbreaking. A remarkably assured debut novel that brings to life a unique world, tells its story with skill, and remains enthralling throughout. A bit of a miracle in its own right.

From the Publisher

Extraordinary . . . Fall-down funny . . . It’s like nothing else you’ve ever read.” –Newsweek

“Vibrant, big-hearted . . . A poignant, picaresque odyssey.” –Chicago Tribune

“Marvelous . . . Edgar Mint is nobody’s Everyman, but he is the hope and the pain of a child looking for, and eventually finding, a home.” –Los Angeles Times

“Be prepared to fall head over heels for Edgar Mint . . . a charming and delightful narrator you can’t help but cheer on through the end.” –The Oregonian

“Profound and stirring . . . brilliantly executed.” –The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170967131
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/05/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close.

With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall’s high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable.

What persists is Edgar’s innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.

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