The Yearling

This book has made me think harder than probably any of the Pulitzer books I've read. That seems strange, doesn't it? A simple book like The Yearling hardly seems thought provoking but for me it was. It is a simple story about a young boy, Jody, who is lonely for companionship and longs to have a pet of some sort. After his father, Penny, shoots a doe, Jody rescues a fawn and makes it his own. He loves the fawn and it is his constant companion. The fawn grows up and is no long a yearling and begins to destroy the crops that Jody's family relies on for food and money so he is told he needs to go out and shoot it. Jody can't and so his mother tries and misses and just wounds him so Jody has to put the deer out of his misery. Jody runs away and grows up himself. At the end his father tells Jody that he is no longer a yearling himself but grew up while he was away.

The story is good, but it's not the part that got me thinking, it's the reading of their everyday life. Jody and his father go hunting a lot to get meat for the family. They talk a lot about what they eat on a daily basis and how they gain it and how they preserve it for the winter months. As I read along, not only did I have the desire to go out and shoot a deer and then smoke the meat, but I wondered is this how life should really be? They worked hard and they had to in order to survive. The planting and plowing were a necessity and in the end when they had a good crop it was a reward for all their hard work. They were together, Jody learned good work ethics, he learned right and wrong in the fields, and the love that he and his father had for each other was so strong because they spent this time together. Again, I wonder is this really the way life should be?

I'd like to teach my children good work ethic but I don't know how. We have a small garden ,but we don't rely on it and I can hardly get my kids to stay out there to help me weed. Maybe it's bad parenting but I can't seem to get them to want to work and to realize the importance of it. Maybe we should have a week or a month where we only rely on our garden to survive, and then we'd all die of starvation probably, I'm not that good of a gardener. I wish that my family could be together all the time, that my kids could run off in to the woods and explore and play. I wish that I spent my day doing things that my family needed so that they could be healthy and live comfortably, all with my hands. This would be a good life.

I spent a lot of time wondering this while reading this book, and decided that I'm probably romanticizing these ideas in my mind. That life would be hard and dirty. And I realize I do like to be able to run to the grocery store and buy some marinated artichoke hearts if I wanted to. I like to be able to run my dishwasher and have clean dishes and my washing machine and dryer and have clean clothes. I also like having all my teeth (something Jody's mom couldn't claim). So how do I find the balance? I guess that's something I'll have to spend my life trying to find. In the meantime, I'll dream of a life in the woods, living off the land, and working my fingers to the bone while I eat some marinated artichoke hearts.

Late George Apley

This was just about the most boring book I've read in a long time. I've never been to Boston, let's just get that out of the way. So if you've ever been to Boston, or know someone who lives in Boston, or if you have money to burn or come from a wealthy east coast family then you might like this book.
I've said before that I'm a character reader. I like books with good characters; I feel it's more important than a story line, and this book had neither. George Apley was not an exciting man, he had his own little world and he lived in it very happily. Nothing exciting really happens. You think he's going to break with tradition and marry a girl outside of their social ring but then his father kind of makes it so it couldn't happen and later George marries a girl inside their social ring. They have the perfect life in a big house and are very concerned about the rose bushes in the front. They have a boy and a girl. And he likes to go bird watching (this is the only way I related with the character, because I too am a birdwatcher) with a lady friend (and she's only a friend). His children rebel and go along with the times and George has to conform to it and he does so quite well, better than his wife. His son marries outside the social circle and I was proud at how well George accepted her and welcomed her into his home even though he had a little disappointment in his son's choice.
All in all it is a book I won't read again and I probably won't suggest it to someone, unless they were a Kennedy.

Gone With the Wind

I have to start by admitting that in the beginning I wasn't completely thrilled to read this book. I've seen the movie and it was cheesy; how could the book be any good? Well, I think this book is one of the best written character books I've read. The story and the characters pull you in. I've thought a lot about how I could review this book, I'm sure there are many reviews of it so what can I say that is different than the other reviews? Probably nothing. I've decided that I would break it down into more of a character review.

Scarlett O'Hara - Scarlett is one of those characters you want to strangle. At the beginning of the book she is a spoiled little brat that has to have her own way. She is in love with Ashley Wilkes, but he is marrying someone else. Even in the beginning you can see that she doesn't understand Ashley and that she and he are completely different; he just fills an ideal. In the middle of the book where she had to leave Atlanta when it was under siege and go back to Tara, I thought so much of her. She was such a fighter and wasn't going to back down from anything! She worked hard to put food on the table for everyone, she took charge, she was admirable. When she needed the tax money and decided to be Rhett Butler's mistress things went down hill. She married her sister's fiancé and became a business woman. Again she was a fighter but this time she was fighting for selfish things, money in particular. She had no regard for anyone else and was once again a brat. When her second husband died and Rhett proposed to her she then turned into the most selfish human being. This is when I wanted to strangle her, I knew she loved Rhett but she wouldn't give up Ashley and then when she finally realized how much she loved Melanie and Rhett and that she didn't love Ashley it was too late. Such a sad ending, but she kind of deserved it.

Ashley Wilkes - I think Ashley is a bit of a wimp. I'm not impressed with him at all and knew for a long time that Scarlett didn't really love him. They had absolutely nothing in common, I think they were just both in love with the past, when life was careless. They were each other's link to that time of their life. He was an intellectual and had lots of book smarts but no common sense. After the war and he had lost all his money and his land he had nothing. He couldn't support a family and gave in to Scarlett and Melanie (his wife) too easily.

Rhett Butler - I know that I shouldn't have liked him as much as I did. He really is a dirty, lying, cheating scoundrel. He loved Scarlett though, truly loved her and was truly hurt by her. He did all he could for Scarlett , Melanie and Melanie's Aunt Pitty Patt. He knew what a good person Melanie was and recognized it. He had so much passion for those he loved and respected and the rest he treated as fools. I think he liked to push people's buttons. He first met Scarlett when she declared her love for Ashley on the same day Ashley became engaged to Melanie, the war started and Scarlett became engaged to Charles Hamilton (she married him to try to make Ashley jealous and he was Melanie's brother). Rhett fell in love with her right then. When Charles dies and Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with Melanie and Aunt Pitty Patt, Rhett shows up on and off and helps them out. He tells Scarlett he's not a marrying man and tries to get her to be his mistress, Scarlett turns him down but he doesn't give up. He finally gives in after Scarlett's second husband dies and proposes to her on the day of the funeral. He spends his life trying to make Scarlett love him by pampering her and giving her whatever she wants. Scarlett has a baby girl and Rhett realizes that Scarlett doesn't love him and gives up on her (they actually begin sleeping in separate rooms) and turns all his attention to their daughter. When their daughter dies in a tragic accident, Rhett falls apart and leaves Scarlett just when she realizes that she never did love Ashley, or at least she hadn't for a long time, and that she really did love Rhett. It broke my heart, not so much for Scarlett because she's an idiot, but for Rhett. He really did love Scarlett and did everything he could to show her and to win her love. He had to live with the knowledge that Scarlett loved someone else (or at least she thought she did) and in the end when Scarlett finally comes to him to love him he is so tired and so sad that he doesn't want to deal with it. Maybe I took the wrong side of this story but this is how I felt.

Melanie Hamilton Wilkes - What can I say about her except she is the most loyal friend that anyone could ask for. Scarlett did not deserve her. After Ashley left for the war Scarlett stayed close to Melanie so that she could be close to Ashley. A couple of times Scarlett and Ashley met up in secret and declared their love for each other and when Ashley refused to run away with Scarlett she never showed her love for him again (in the physical sense). Scarlett saved Melanie's life when Melanie had a baby on the day that Atlanta was being raided and they had to evacuate. Scarlett took Melanie, Melanie's new baby and their servant to Tara (after Rhett abandoned them on the road so he could join the army). She fought when they arrived at Tara to keep Melanie and the baby alive, she made sure they had enough to eat. So because Scarlett did all this Melanie became a devoted friend to Scarlett and stood by her even when the city of Atlanta was accusing Scarlett and Ashley of having an affair. Scarlett hated Melanie until the day Melanie died and then she realized that Melanie was the best friend she had.

These are the main characters of the story. Of course, there are many others but I won't go into all of them. Gone With the Wind is an epic novel and even though it is over 1,000 pages it keeps you involved and interested the entire time. I don't think at any point I was bored and anxious for it to end. I always judge a book by how I feel when it is over. If I'm happy it's over than the book wasn't that great for me. If I mourn the loss of the companionship of the characters from the book than that book goes on my favorites list. I mourned the loss of these characters and thought of them often after I put the book down. I enjoyed Gone With the Wind and highly recommend it as a classic everyone should read.

Honey in the Horn

This book was rather refreshing to read. After the last few books that have all been sad and a bit depressing this book had none of that. It was a good old Western novel. It is about a young man named Clay who has a strange family history and is taken in by an old man who loves to tell stories. When the book first starts it seems that this man will be the main character of the story and that he will go on and on about these old stories, but thankfully it only lasts for the first chapter or so. Well, this old man has a couple of sons who are bad kids and law breakers, but have outsmarted the law until now. His older son was killed and the younger son was arrested. The older man goes to Clay and asks him to help break his son out of jail. Clay who is a bit of a hard and ornery young man agrees to help. He passes a gun to the guy in jail and then takes off. He becomes a sort of outlaw running from the law. At one point he sees a young girl who is traveling with a horse racer (who is her father) and he kind of falls for her. Luckily they meet up again and he travels with them. This girl, Luce, and Clay kind of fall in love. They both have secrets: she doesn't know that he helped a man escape from prison, and he doesn't know her secret, which is tied up in his secret. But they are happy not knowing each other's secret.

They go along traveling and working in different places. They have a fight and then get back together and become even stronger and leave her father and mother (they are strange in their own way) and go out on their own. At one point she becomes really sick and is afraid for him to leave her but he knows that he can't help her so he leaves her to go find someone to help her, but she told him that if he left her when he came back she wouldn't be there. He leaves anyway and comes back and she is gone. He goes on and works odd jobs and eventually they meet up again and stay together.

This book didn't "move" me or make me think real hard about life and things, it was just a good story and was enjoyable to read. I learned to like Clay, even though at the beginning he's kind of a stinker, in the end he is a good guy and does care about people around him.

Now in November

I've been thinking a lot about what to write about this book, not because it moved me to ponder much but mostly because it DIDN'T move me. It's a story about a family with three girls, a mother, and a father. The father gets laid off at a factory job so he decides to farm. They have to mortgage their farm and this is like a monkey on their backs. The girl, Margret who is the middle child, is the narrator and she often refers to the mortgage as something they have to bear and constantly worry about. The father sounds like an unfeeling, over stressed man. He doesn't seem to care for his girls and is so worried about the farm and all the work that comes with it that he rarely seems happy at all. Luckily his wife is a kind, loving woman who makes up for her husband's lack of emotions. The oldest daughter, Kerrin, is a nutcase, seriously. If I had a psychiatry degree I could diagnose her problem for you, but I don't so all I can say is "cuckoo". The summary on the outside of the book says that she wishes she was a boy, I didn't get that at all. To me she just seemed like she needed to escape the farm and fall in love and go away to a big city where there is lots of excitement and she would kind of blend in with the crowd. As it is she is stuck on the farm and to me it seemed she hates the farm and all the work that goes with it. She becomes a teacher in the nearby town but gets fired because she isn't really teaching at all and is very short wit the students. That's kind of the second to last straw for her. Then the narrator, Margret, is kind of a plain Jane who no one really thinks of but everyone likes. She does her chores and helps out the best she can. The youngest is Merle; everyone loves Merle. She is very quiet and kind and apparently beautiful. A young man Grant comes to live with them and help their Dad work on the farm. Kerrin and Margret fall in love with Grant, but Grant falls in love with Merle and Merle won't have anything to do with Grant in that respect. In fact, Kerrin tries to make a pass at Grant and he didn't respond and that was the very last straw and she ends up running off with her Dad's knife and kills herself.

The family has lots of hardships as the depression comes on. It describes the months of no rain and how it affects their farm and their livelihood. One night a fire breaks out on their property and they all run out to put it out and while they're doing that their mom catches fire and later dies from those injuries. There are stories of neighboring farmers who also have nothing. One is a family who is renting a farm and just can't make ends meet to pay the rent and they are kicked off their property. It's a sad view of life during this stage of the depression and what they had to endure and how they had hope that it would end soon.

I only gave this book two balls of yarn mostly because it was sad, and I think I'm tired of reading sad books. It was also written very abstractly. For the first third of the book I wasn't sure if I was reading about the present or past. Near the end of the book I began to understand the writing and really started enjoying it and then it ended. It was hard for me to feel engaged or to care about the characters. The only character who caused me to feel anything was Kerrin and she only made me uncomfortable. I actually bought this book because it was so hard to find here, but I think it might be one I'll give to the Friends of the Library for the book sale, not my favorite.

Lamb in His Bosom

I have dreams, one of the things that I dream about doing sometimes is living in the middle of nowhere long ago, before modern conveniences and living off the land. Well, that dream is no longer there after reading this book. This book centers around one woman Cean (said see ann) and her life. At the beginning of the book she gets married to a good man named Lonzo and they are heading to their new home, a brand new cabin built in the middle of the Georgia woods. Cean is young (I don't remember if it tells how old she was, but I think she was around 16 or 17), but she is excited about the prospects of her new life coming up. Her husband is good to her and they are quite happy and seem to have everything they need. She is soon pregnant with their first and it spends a lot of time on how she feels being pregnant and then the horrors of delivery. She is not anxious to have another but soon conceives and bears another daughter. After her second child is born she returns to her happy free self until she becomes pregnant with her third which she is not happy about. The story that got me the most happens when her third child, a son, is born. Lonzo is away to the coast where he goes once a year for two weeks to trade their goods from their farm for other things they need. She went into labor early and worked through it for the day with her two daughters running around. It is so hot that the little girls are not wearing any clothes and they have the windows and doors open. As night falls she puts the girls to sleep on her bed (again not wearing any clothes, it's so hot) and around midnight she bears her son. She is so exhausted, for obvious reasons, that she lays on her bed with her newborn son and begins to fall asleep. She remembers that she left the windows open but decided she didn't need to worry because the hound dogs were quiet. Of course, right then the dogs started howling and she realizes that the mountain lions (or painters as she called them) could smell the blood from the delivery of her son and were drawn to her house. She gets out of bed to close the windows and the door, and after she does she turns around only to find a mountain lion in her home standing between her and her newborn baby and two older daughters. She grabs the gun and shoots the mountain lion and then climbs into bed. It made me thankful for hospitals and epidurals and that I don't have to worry about wild animals coming into my house. Also, I've been imagining the scenario and realized that there were probably flies everywhere, so it makes me also grateful for screens on my windows and door.

Times goes on and she ends up bearing around 16 children. The reason I gave this book three stars was because it is so sad. She is surrounded by sorrow and death. Her brother is an adulterer and leaves his wife to go to California and his wife marries his brother. Her parents die and another time Lonzo is gone to the coast she has 14 or so children at this point her house burns down in the middle of the night and she has to take her 14 kids and walk 6 miles to her parent's house to stay until Lonzo could come home and build them a new house.

This book cured me of ever wanting to live in the wilderness. In my mind it sounds so ideal. Surrounded by nature, living off the land, working hard to provide for my family, the only sounds are sounds of nature, etc. But this book brought me back to reality and what it really means, bugs everywhere, wild animals, no air conditioner, no dishwasher or washer and dryer, no lights that come on with the flip of a switch, no running water straight from the faucet , and most importantly no flushing toilets.

There was one thing that struck me about this book. Cean loved her children very much, it showed in how she grieved for those she lost and how she thought about her children, but I don't think she enjoyed them much. At this time her children were there to work for her, her oldest cooked the meals and cared for the younger children, the boys worked out in the field for her husband. She didn't have time, like I do now, to stop and play with her children to tickle them and tease them. I love being with my children, talking to them, laughing at their jokes and just learning who they are. This is another thing I didn't think of. Like I said she was so busy doing her work, cleaning, spinning cotton for clothes, cooking, and caring for the animals that it consumed her time and all those children were a burden to her because they were mostly girls, which meant they couldn't be out in the field helping their father. Another thing that I'm grateful for living in this time is education. She did know how to read, but she had never gone to school and neither do her children. Well, actually they did for a few short weeks until she developed a grudge against the new priest who was running the school (she actually marries him later on) and then she pulled them out to make a point. I'm glad that my children get an education and for the opportunity to see them learn.

This book opened my eyes to reality and how much I do have to be grateful for, so maybe I should give it five stars instead for doing that for me.

The Store

I'm still not sure what to write or think about this book. It is a gray book. The main character Colonel Miltiades Vaiden is a gray person. By this I mean he is honest and brave but he's also domineering and highly prejudiced, which is according to the time and place that he lived. This story takes place shortly after the Civil War in Alabama. Colonel Vaiden was the leader of the Klan where he lived and also ran a cotton plantation where he was in charge of all the slaves. The book starts by telling about how after the war ended he didn't have any prospects of being great; he's married to an overweight woman named Ponny (he married her for money which he never received), and he is very poor and living in a shabby house. The whole town is anxious for Grover Cleveland to be elected as President of the U.S. because he's a democrat and they think he will help the economy of the South. On the other hand, all the African Americans there are afraid that they will have to be slaves again if a democrat is elected to office.

Col. Vaiden has a mortal enemy named Mr. Handback. Years before Col. Vaiden's family had a great cotton harvest and "sold" it to Mr. Handback in the morning of the same day that Mr. Handback declared bankruptcy and the Vaidens were never paid the money they earned. They blamed this incident of why Co. Vaiden had a lack of prestige and income. Col. Vaiden, however wants to start a store and goes to work for Mr. Handback in his store to see how it is done. All the African Americans go to him at the store because he's honest with them. He will give them a pound of bacon if they ask for it and Mr. Handback asks him to stop. This is the most irritating thing about the book-- the treatment of these ex-slaves. It really opened my eyes to the struggle that they had after they were set free and what they had to go through to make a voice for themselves. Even though they were free, they were still treated like slaves and the older men and women felt they had to continue to act this way to live a happy life.

Meanwhile we are introduced to Gracie Vaiden who was a slave for the Vaiden family and her son, Toussaint. We find out that Toussaint is actually the Colonel's son, though neither of them know it. The night before Col. Vaiden was to be married to a rich girl, Drusilla Laceback, she ran off with another man. In his rage, Col. Vaiden rapes Gracie and she becomes pregnant. Poor Gracie. She was a "companion" for a captain in the army (this is who Col. Vaiden thinks is the father of Toussaint) and for Mr. Handback. She is barely dark at all, there is so much Vaiden blood in her and Toussaint is almost completely white. He dreams of moving to the North where he believes he could live as a white man and no one would know.

While Col. Vaiden is working for Mr. Handback he basically steals all of Mr. Handback's cotton and sells it. He makes over forty thousand dollars, then for some reason after he gets the money he goes to confront Mr. Handback. By this time Mr. Handback already knows what happened (he originally thought the cotton had washed away in a big rainstorm) and they get into a fight. A young law student (I forgot his name, sorry) comes and tries to help them come to an agreement. Col. Vaiden has to spend the night in jail. The next morning the young law student comes and tells the Col that he only has to give Mr. Handback ten thousand dollars and sign a document that he won't press any charges and they'll forget the whole thing. After he gets out of jail thinking he got off pretty free he finds that his wife had a miscarriage and died because she was frightened by the sheriff and Mr. Handback who were looking for the money and digging in their back yard. He's really not too saddened by Ponny's death and is now wealthy.

All the while the Colonel has a nephew who came to Florence to go to college and he is boarding with the Colonels brother and his wife. Jerry (this is the nephew's name) is odd. He declares he is an atheist and has a desire to reach a higher power. He knows that if he can overcome certain emotions, such as, lust, anger, revenge, that a wise man will come to him and tell him the secrets of life and he will be elevated to greatness. Unfortunately he meets Sydna Crowninshield who is Drusilla's daughter. He falls in love with her even though she is a few years older than him.

Well, the Colonel begins to buy property and buys the old plantation that he used to run (the Lacefield's, all these families are intertwined) from Mr. Handback because he is broke and needs to sell things off. The Col puts Gracie and Toussaint out there to run the plantation and they do a great job of it. So the Colonel thinks that now that he is wealthy and has all this land and he also opened a store in the town that Drusilla will marry him. He begins to go to the Crowninshield home to get back into their good graces. I need to mention that Sydna always looked to the Colonel as her protector. She was told by her mother that the Colonel was there when Sydna's father died on the battlefield and asked the Colonel to look after his daughter, so she admired the Colonel greatly. When the Colonel asks Drusilla to marry him she refuses and he finds out that she believes her daughter is in love with the Colonel so he asks Sydna if she is and if she would marry him and so she does. It never tells how old he is, just middle age and Sydna is in her mid-twenties, but they do get married. At one point I thought Jerry and Sydna might run off before the wedding, but they don't and she marries him.

At this time Mr. Handback is depressed because he is so poor and losing so much money. He goes to Gracie and asks her to run away with him to Mexico where they could have a normal life together. She is about to, but tells him that she let the Colonel hide the money he stole from Mr. Handback in her house and he gets angry at her betrayal to him and he goes out and kills himself. Toussaint meets a young school teacher and marries her and they begin to run the plantation.

The young law student and Mr. Handback's son accuse the Colonel of not having the correct deed to the land and so he's about to loose it. The postmaster, who is a character in himself, but I feel like this is getting too long so I won't go into him too much, approaches the Colonel and tells him he was visited by someone who was dead and had a message for the Colonel that what he needs is in the cash drawer. The Colonel goes to his store and searches his cash drawer but there isn't anything in there. The Colonel now has to sell off some belongings to make up for the money he owes to everyone. He goes to the plantation and tells Toussaint and his wife, Lucy, that they need to bring all the farming tools to town so he can sell them. They go to the young now attorney (he passed the bar) and they file a suit against the Colonel saying that he was going against the contract. This enrages the town and they go to court. The ending is strange and I think a little strained. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. The town freaks out about two thieves who the Sheriff brought in and puts in the jail. These thieves are alluded to throughout the book, but they never actually come into Florence, so I'm not sure why they are all so angry about these two men. But they attack the jail, but Toussaint is in there awaiting the judge's ruling on his suit against the Colonel. The town people are waiting for the Governor to leave the town so they can lynch these two thieves, around four o'clock. Gracie goes to the Colonel and tells him that Toussaint is his son and they go to save him from the jail but are too late. They see three men hanging from the tree. While the Colonel is grieving and thinking over the events of the day one of Mr. Handback's clerk comes to him and says that he was going through Mr. Handbacks documents and found the deed the Colonel needed in the cash drawer.

The story of this was good. It was very unpredictable. As I was reading I thought I knew what was going to happen, but something entirely different and rather strange would happen. The whole story of Jerry and his enlightenment seemed to be a strange character for the time and place that this novel is set. I think that it was interesting to read the social change that was slowly coming through this book, but irritating at the same time at the white men who felt that the n-----s (yes, this is what they called them through the whole book) shouldn't be educated because nothing good could come from it and that they should be kept in their place of manual labor for the white man. It makes me admire those of the African American race who stood up for themselves and made a change.