Southern Challenge wrap-up

Many thanks to Maggie for hosting the Southern Challenge! It was great fun (and only 3 books, for which I thank her!)


The challenge was to read 3 books by Southern authors and I picked:
1. Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson
2. Miss Julia Speaks her Mind by Ann B. Ross
3. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

The best book? They were all really good, but I just loved Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind - it was truly delightful.

Any new authors? All of them. I'll definitely be reading more of Joshilyn Jackson and the Miss Julia series.

Book I could have done without? None of them. Hannah Coulter probably isn't a book I'd have picked up without the challenge, but I was glad I did. And that's what challenges are for, right? Broadening one's reading horizons! :)

What I learned from this challenge: Well, I already knew I enjoyed Southern literature, but I'd stayed mostly in the chick lit/romance vein, so this helped me discover that there's much more to the genre. And I also came across so many new and interesting bloggers from keeping track of the challenge at Maggie Reads.

(Thanks to Book Haven and Eva for the questions!)

Review: Hannah Coulter

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Phew, just made it in the nick of time! This is my third and final Southern Challenge book.

Summary (from Publishers Weekly): "This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.... This is my story, my giving of thanks." So begin the reflections of Hannah Coulter, the twice-widowed protagonist of this slim, incandescent novel in Berry's Port William series. In 1940, the precocious, innocent Hannah leaves her small Kentucky farming town to work as a secretary in nearby Hargrave, where she meets Virgil Feltner, seven years her senior, who gently courts her. They marry and have a daughter, but Virgil, "called to the army in 1942," dies in the Battle of the Bulge. Love follows mourning, as a kind but driven farmer, Nathan Coulter, returns from combat and woos Hannah. In delicate, shimmering prose, Berry tracks Hannah's loves and losses through the novel's first half; the narrative sharpens as Hannah recounts her children's lives ... as Hannah relates her children's fate to her own deeply rooted rural background, she weaves landscape and family and history together ("My mind... is close to being the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal and all creatures prosperous").

My thoughts: Not much really "happens" in this book, but it's a lovely, quiet, solid novel. Most of it reads like an actual memoir - Hannah's voice is incredibly real as she describes her life, I was very impressed. That's what the novel's about, life - joys, sorrows, love, hard work, family and friends. Hannah lived in a time that's just about gone now - where friends and extended family formed the "membership" of a town like Port William. Hannah sees life as a blessing, even the hard times, and she and her husband Nathan live by the notion that they will "live right on" no matter what happens. There were many wonderful quotes about life and love throughout the book, actually - I kept meaning to remember them all, but there got to be too many.

The family's farm and Port William are described in loving detail. I didn't get much of a feel for Kentucky itself (which is why I chose the book - I've recently become interested in that state) but Port William is a character in the book as much as any individual person.

There are some bits of humour, too. My favourite was at the end when a young developer thinks that Hannah is an poor old widow woman who doesn't know the value of her property and she sets him straight on that score.

Overall conclusion: Despite it feeling more "fictional" at the end (in a sweet way, though) and not really liking the part about the Battle of the Bulge (which seemed a bit tacked on), I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Hannah Coulter and her kin.

Review: Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind by Ann B. Ross
5 stars

Summary: The story of Julia Springer, a proper Presbyterian wife in a small North Carolina town, who finds her true self after the sudden death of Wesley Lloyd, her husband of 44 years. It turns out that Wesley Lloyd was a millionaire and Julia never knew it - he didn't think women should have any knowledge of finance and he seemed to think he'd take it with him, anyway. Julia is just getting used to the role of rich widow (and finding it very much to her liking) when Hazel Marie Puckett appears on the front porch with a nine-year-old boy in tow who is the spitting image of Wesley Lloyd. Hazel Marie is on her way to beauty school in Raleigh and since Wesley Lloyd left her nothing, she decides to leave Junior with Miss Julia. Meanwhile, Miss Julia's fortune has attracted a variety of opportunists, particularly Pastor Ledbetter, who insinuates that her departed husband planned to leave his money to the church and then goes on a campaign to have Miss Julia declared incompetent. In the end, Miss Julia comes into her self marvelously, after years of being told what to think by her husband and her church.

Why'd I pick it up? I had about the newest one in the series in a review journal and it indicated it was a popular series and it sounded good, so I added it to by TBR list. And then along came the Southern Reading Challenge, so it was a perfect time to read it!

Favourite quote: Miss Julia makes so many wry observations, it's hard to pick one. But one that sticks in my mind is this one about the slimy Brother Vern, as he sits down, "his thighs bulging like hams. I don't normally notice such intimate details of a man, but polyester makes for a snug fit."

Overall: It was absolutely not what I expected. I was thinking it was either going to be a Murder, She Wrote type of mystery or the story of a small town busybody. It was much, much better!

I don't want to give too much away - there are lots of twists and turns and people popping up. The supporting characters are very well-done and colourful. Julia's black maid, Lillian, is a very wise friend (though, as one review mentioned, she talks like someone out of Gone With the Wind), the polyester-clad Brother Vern is every inch the oily televangelist, and Pastor Ledbetter is so insincere while trying to be caring I wanted to slap him. The ending is a happy, if unconventional one, and I look forward to reading more of Miss Julia's adventures.

Southern Reading Challenge, Book 1: Between, Georgia

Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson
Rating: 4 stars

This book was nothing at all like I expected. I don't know why, but I was thinking it would be fairly standard chick lit with a Southern twang. But it's definitely more than that. (There's actually more to it than I can include here, but I'll give you the gist.)

Nonny Frett is truly a native of the tiny town of Between, Georgia because she's caught between two families and two lives. She was born to the unwed, unstable Hazel Crabtree but deaf/almost blind Stacia Frett knew she was Nonny's mother as soon as she came into the world (in the middle of her sister's living room). The Crabtrees and Fretts have a long-standing feud and Nonny is caught right in the middle. She's raised by Stacia and her sisters - Stacia's fraternal twin, the nervous, sweet Genny and the steam-rolling, brash Bernese. Nonny learns sign language before she can speak and loves her mother wholeheartedly. But her biological grandmother, Ona - "half-crazy, all mean, perpetually drunk" - wants her to be a Crabtree. Nonny is red-headed and freckled like the Crabtrees and sometimes has their temper, but she feels more like a meticulous Frett. The Frett-Crabtree feud is at the heart of the novel - it causes some terrible events that change Nonny's way of thinking about her life and her family.

Nonny is also caught between her own life in Athens, GA where she works as an ASL translator and the need to come home on weekends and look after her now deaf-blind mother (not that Stacia needs much help, she's pretty amazing) and the fluttery, self-harming Genny. She's been trying to get divorced from her cheating, laid-back musician husband Jonno for a year now but she keeps putting it off and she keeps sleeping with him.

Jackson writes, there's "no such thing as a town smaller than Between" and it certainly seems that way - most of the action in the town happens in the town square, with its fountain and flowerbeds, surrounded by a few businesses in Victorian buildings - a B&B, a diner, a bookstore, the Baptist church, and Bernese's rather creey, roadside-attraction-like Dollhouse Museum where she combines displays of Stacia's famous porcelain dolls with her own obsession - butterfly farming. Right across from the square the quaintness ends - there lies the Crabtrees' squalid gas station/parts yard, complete with 3 vicious Dobermans.

I enjoyed this novel. Being adopted, I was really interested in the nature vs. nurture parts of Nonny's personality, particularly since she knew exactly where they both came from, which is rare. Stacia, as I said, is amazing - despite her lack of sight and hearing, she's the most level-headed of the sisters and the most eloquent, even though she can't speak. Her relationship with Nonny was one of the strongest, best-written mother-daughter relationships I've read about in quite a while. And there are other quirky Betweenians to enjoy, as well.

Southern Challenge

And here's the Southern Challenge! This one's fairly quick (thank goodness!) - between June and August read 3 books by Southern authors with Southern settings. I love Southern lit, so I was game. 2 of the books were already on my to be read list, anyway!

1. Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson (Georgia)
2. Miss Julia Speaks her Mind by Ann B. Ross (North Carolina)
3. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (Kentucky)