Ramona Blue
reviewdate:
Aug 18 2018
isn:
9780062418371
Tagged with south
Hole We're In, the
reviewdate:
Dec 31 2015
isn:
9780802197894
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All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion, the
Fannie Flagg novels always go down easy and are southern charming as all get-out. All-Girl centers on a 60-year-old woman who finds out she's not southern, at least not in the southern way of knowing who your people are a few generations back. It's also about Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Unless you're a real crankypants, you should be moved by protagonist Sookie Poole's evolution, the WASPs accomplishments, or both. I sniffled quite a bit reading about the titular event while riding a New Jersey transit train home from Jewish Christmas.
reviewdate:
Dec 25 2013
isn:
978-0-8129-9463-6
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recommendation:
Beautiful Creatures
I read Beautiful Creatures because it's vampire YA, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but what I liked most about it was the depiction of life in a small southern town. Although authored by women it's told from a teenage boy's point of view. Since I mostly eschew books written by men, don't meet a lot of male narrators, and it's kind of neat to spend time in a dude's head once in awhile.
reviewdate:
Feb 22 2013
isn:
978-0-316-04267-3
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Help, the
I'm wary of wildly popular Oprah-ish books, admittedly not because I'm afraid they'll be bad, but because I'm afraid they'll be good. It would be bad for my literary cred if I embraced every manipulative mass appeal tearjerker that came along! As it turns out, The Help is worthy of adulation. It's a brave book, written by a white author about the black servant/white employer relationship in 1960s Mississippi.
"I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature." p.450
reviewdate:
Apr 13 2010
isn:
978-0-399-15534-5
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recommendation:
Club Dead
I know, I know, I'm sick of reading all this paranormal fiction. I really need something a little meatier right now. But it also has to be compelling. I've been in a bad way for all of 2009, literarily speaking, I think. Suggestions welcome for literary fiction (along the lines of A Map of Home or Peony in Love, for example) and Twilight readalikes!
reviewdate:
May 20 2009
isn:
978-0-441-01051-6