Apr
10
I finished reading my latest book, The Blue Bottle Club, this past week. I really enjoyed it; it was somewhat different than the others I had been reading lately. I will put a review of it in Hambones on the reviews page. I also did 3 more “books” last week—-books on tape that is. First up was At Home in Mitford, then Crazy in Alabama and the last one was The Summerhouse. Out of those three, I enjoyed the Mitford one better than the other two!
Stacy said Crazy in Alabama is a movie also, and I looked it up and I think she’s right. It was very strange and different than some others I’ve read and I’m not sure I liked it! It is told through the voice of the adult PeeJoe reminiscing about his childhood during the summer of 1965 in Alabama. His Aunt Lucille wants to be an actress and gets the chance to audition for the Beverly Hillbillies tv show. Her husband says no so she kills him, cuts his head off with an electric knife and stuffs it into a Tupperware lettuce keeper and travels across country with it. She leaves her 6 children with her mother so PeeJoe and his brother go to live with their uncle in another small town in Alabama. There is racial unrest in this town during that summer and the 2 stories are interwoven together. I think the cover of the tape said that it was hilarious, or something like that but I didn’t really find it to be too funny. Not the sort of thing that I guess I’m fond of.
The Summerhouse is about 3 women about to turn 40 and they decide to spend their birthday together at a summerhouse in Maine. They had met at the DMV when they turned 21 and were renewing their driver’s licenses and spent a day together. But now it has been 19 years since they had seen one another so they catch up on each other during their time together in Maine. They go to talk with Madame Zoya, a fortune teller/pyschic who gives them some choices they can make about their past and futures. This was where it got a little different to me and more fantasy like I suppose! I don’t want to say too much about it because I think Stacy will read it……..don’t wait til summer, it really doesn’t have much to do with summer anyway! But I suppose it can make you think about choices you make and how one choice can lead you one direction or another; but I don’t usually like to think about stuff too much when reading!
At Home in Mitford is a homespun tale about Father Tim, an Episcopal priest in this small town in North Carolina. Nothing much bad happens there and his lonely life is filled slowly but surely with unlikely characters. This is a series and I would probably read more of these later on. Out of the 3 I listened to, I liked this one first, Summerhouse next and Crazy in Alabama last and not nearly as much!
The Blue Bottle Club I loved reading! In Ashville, North Carolina, on Christmas Day in 1929, 4 teenage girls write their hopes and dreams for the future on slips of paper and store them in a cobalt blue bottle and hide it in the rafters of an attic. Sixty five years later a newswoman covering the story of the demolition of the house is given the bottle by one of the workers. She reads the papers written by the young girls and is determined to track the women down, find out what happened in their lives and do a human interest story on them. Their stories are about broken dreams and betrayed hearts and what they discover in their journey of life.
The review on hambones is here
April 10th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Cool, I’m definitely going to read both Summerhouse (it’s been on my library list for over a year, but I just have too many books on my list!), and Blue Bottle Club. Thanks for the reviews.
I’m glad you liked Mitford, I love those books 🙂
August 3rd, 2006 at 1:45 pm
gail, could you give me the address for hambones? Never heard of it, is it a personal site? I would like to read your reviews, if the site isn’t personal.