The Optimist’s Daughter

Thoughts by Eudora Welty, Vintage Books 1990 (orig 1969), 180 pages

Challenge: Classics Club, CC50_part2, WiaN – inspired by Ann Patchett

Genre/Theme: Adult Fiction, Southern Lit, Grief

Type/Source: Tradeback/Book-A-Holic purchase

Carolina Book Nook hosts the WiaN Challenge

What It’s About: Laurel is the daughter of the “Optimist”. She is in her mid-forties, and her mother has been dead over 10, maybe 15 years already. Last year, her father the Optimist up and married Fay, who is maybe forty but probably only late 30s and looks even younger.

Let’s just say that Fay is a piece of work. The southern ladies would say, “Bless her heart”. Actually, I don’t think they even bother with that. All the menfolk think Fay is tender and helpless and to be pitied. The women, not so much.

UGH. (Fay really appalled me.)

Father dies, Laurel manages (by which I mean that she “processes”), Fay annoys and despairs.

Thoughts: Please please please let me know your thoughts if you have read this. I wrote on a Litsy review:

So very much to think about! Packs a punch and not only because it is about grief but about personality, society expectations (and burdens) and perception. Would be a terrific book club book.

Rating: Four slices of pie. Probably on me that I kept getting confused who was who at the funeral. Could be a fiver.

You’ve got pies three deep in the pantry, and an icebox ready to pop.

 

 

Advertisement

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Updated to add links to the TOB:

• March 22 loss to Pachinko.
• March 14 win over The Book of Joan.

 

 

 

Thoughts  by Jesmyn Ward, Simon Schuster Audio 2017, 8 hours 22 minutes

Narrated by Kelvin Harrison Jr, Chris Chalk, Rutina Wesley – RECOMMENDED

Challenge: Tournament of Book 2018

Genre: Southern Lit, Magic Realism

Type/Source: Audiobook / Audible

 Why I read this now: Hot book in the TOB that I had heard of more than some of the others. 

MOTIVATION for READING:  I hadn’t read a Jesmyn Ward book. Am eager still to read everything she produced/s, past and future.

WHAT’s it ABOUT:  I will provide the official blurb from the ‘official’ reader’s guide on the publisher’s website:

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, she brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied Sing is a majestic work that belongs in the canon of American literature.

WHAT’s GOOD: A lot. The writing, the imagery, the connections. Masterful.

What’s NOT so good: Perhaps it was the audio, but it took me a long time to figure out a few things – that is ME, not the fault of the book. (Driving and listening in winter travel conditions might not be the best medium for enjoying a shocking story.) But upon reading other thoughts and reactions, I have come to appreciate what was happening. This is a book that gets better in your mind the more you think about it.

FINAL THOUGHTS:  This would be a great book for wise discussion and I am certain that it could only increase in appreciation. It is a powerful, masterful piece of literature and possibly could be, will be the kind of book taught in high schools for years to come; a classic already.

RATING: Four FIVE slices of pie. No pie mentioned.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2018. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.