2025 NAIWE Literary Fiction Winner
Author: Elizabeth Tucker
A longer book than average, The Pale Flesh of Wood sits at exactly 300 pages, and it is divided into three books, each labeled with a time frame to link to the progression of the story.
The Pale Flesh of Wood opens with seven-year-old Lyla and her WWII veteran father Charles Hawkins working together to hang a rope for a tire swing. Charles had wanted a tire swing as a child, but his mother never would give permission for him to have one. Now that Charles’s mother has finally given her permission for a tire swing to be hung from one of her trees, it has become Lyla’s job to climb up the tree, drag her body out on the tree’s branch, and tie the rope on the branch, all under the unreliable supervision of her father.
Shortly after the tire swing has been hung, Lyla’s father hangs himself on the very rope that Lyla hung from the branch; Lyle struggles with coming to terms as to whether she helped facilitate the death of her father.
With book 1 occurring primarily in the 1950s, book 2 in the 1960s, and book 3 in 1981, the reader can examine this one significant event, the death of Lyla’s father, and visualize how it affected three generations within the one family.
Elizabeth Tucker does a masterful job of taking the reader on an emotional, realistic roller coaster ride of a tragic situation.
Congratulations, Elizabeth Tucker’s The Pale Flesh of Wood for being a NAIWE 2025 Book Award winner!
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