Ray, Janisse Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2003. 288 pp.

Thoughts of pulling up stakes and starting over are common. Usually the dream involves moving to a place where we are strangers, where we can reinvent ourselves. Author Janisse Ray took this journey in reverse and in the second installment of her memoir, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, recalls leaving the life she had forged in Montana and moving back to her native Baxley, Georgia. Back to the town she had left never thinking she would return seventeen years later as a single mom with son, Silas, in tow.

In the opening paragraph of her narrative, Ray reveals the scale of her move to Georgia, “When I shoved open the door of my grandmother Beulah’s farmhouse, shut tight and neglected many heavy-hearted years, I entered a history that stretched backward not simply to the limits of my memory, but to the farthest point of my family’s memory.” This is a statement that tells the true scope of Wild Card Quilt because Ray’s book touches on the ideas of family, relationships, and identity as well as looking at the more global idea of humankind’s relation to nature and to the environment.

Those familiar with Janisse Ray’s highly acclaimed first book, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, know that she noted every sight, sound, smell, and sentiment from her childhood and recalled them in vivid and often hilarious detail. Her newest book does not disappoint as we watch the family relationships that have been at a distance, both physically and emotionally, change once the physical distance is bridged.

The author and her mother reconnect while creating the Wild Card Quilt of the title. The metaphor is a strong one as the differences between Ray and her mother are highlighted by their choices of fabric. In describing her mother's choices Ray says, “Her quilt squares told of meekness, gentleness, long suffering, wisdom. They saluted a strength to keep going to put food on the table when you didn’t know where it was coming from, to love even when things fell apart. The flower-spangled squares told that my mother had been through fire and was not charred.”

Mother and daughter’s love and respect for each other are highlighted as the disparate quilt blocks are joined to form a quilt that is beautiful and whole even though it is without an overall pattern and the fabrics do not match exactly. This is an apt description of Ray and her family. Ray is deeply spiritual, but her spirituality stems from nature and from her family themselves, while her family’s beliefs, especially her father’s, stem from God and Christianity in particular.

But Wild Card Quilt, like Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, is about so much more than Janisse Ray and family relations. It is even about more than Ray’s relationship to the changing landscape of her native South Georgia. This is a book that invites all readers to examine themselves and their relationship with the rest of the world.