Changes

|title=Edisto

|author=Padgett Powell

|reviewer=John Lloyd

|publisher=Serpent's Tail

|date=November 2012

|summary=A much more conventional debut for Padgett Powell, giving us a rarefied coming-of-age story very much at odds with his later novels.

}}

Welcome to the household of the Duchess and our narrator, Simons (pronounced as with two Ms), a luxurious building set in the Carolinian coastal town of Edisto, and a white household in a friendly black neighbourhood. Our story starts when a man arrives, trying to serve a court order to the maid's daughter, an act which drives the maid to flee, and which leads to the man replacing her in her shack. He doesn't exactly do the housework as she did, but he does help the household out, for the Duchess is quite Bohemian in attitude, and wants her twelve year old boy to be a dazzling authorial prodigy. He already has a stool with his name on at the local black bar, but the man – who Simons decides to call Taurus – is going to be a peculiar father figure, opening his world up into that of adulthood.