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Title: Quite a Year for Plums : A Novel by Bailey White ISBN: 0-679-76492-5 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 06 April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.03 (58 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Started out funny and then...stopped
Comment: When I started reading it, I kept thinking that I had found a writer I could read again and again. After page 143, I knew I couldn't finish this book unless someone put a gun to my head. The contrast between the beginning and the middle was not dramatic, there just wasn't one. The puns stopped being "punny" because we had read them too many times and the story started to drag and become dull like dish water. The characters were quirky, but nothing happened in the book and the lack of a plotline couldn't hold my interest in the quirky characters. We get to know a lot about Georgia and chickens and birds and forests and peanuts and oscillating fans and... But information does not make up for the snapshot this book is. Instead of moving along, it stays static.
Rating: 2
Summary: Quite a topsy turvy book!
Comment: It's one thing to make your readers work, but it's another to make the reader work, and then for nothing.
Thank goodness I got this from the library. White may be good on NPR, but she's definitely not good here. The first chapters had me referring constantly to the list of characters, simply because White throws you a new name every other paragraph. With other books, this isn't a problem, the problem here is the author seems to give us the names, but no other information. Sure, there's dialogue, but I need some kind of identifying characteristic, White! Tell me if their eyes are blue, brown, are they tall, short, thin, have hair, no hair, STUFF!!! It was a pain getting through the first few chapters. I had trouble remembering who was who. The other thing that adds to the difficulty is the fact that there seems to be no plot. (Makes it even harder to remember who's trying to accomplish what) AND, because there's no "plot", halfway through the book, after a fund-raising picnic and a bird art exhibition, I started to wonder what was the point of all this, then I stopped wondering and returned the book to the library.
Rating: 5
Summary: CHARACTERS WHO TOUCH YOUR HEART
Comment: Popular radio commentator Bailey White's first novel abounds with smile-provoking snapshots of lovable yet eccentric inhabitants of rural Georgia, very much like her early collections of vignettes - Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping At The Starlite Motel. The plot line may be thin in Quite A Year For Plums, but the countryside is thick with idiosyncratic characters who touch your heart.
Roger, a "U. Of Ga. Plant pathologist" whose specialty is peanuts, has been divorced by Ethel, a schoolteacher with a rapacious appetite for men. Her conquests include Jim Wade, an avid collector of desk fans; a Nashville songwriter; and a boat builder who leaves her home carpeted in wood shavings.
Ethel's adventuresome spirit may have been inherited from her mother, Louise, who is convinced spacemen regularly visit their community. She times alien visits with her Wal-Mart clock, while attempting to lure them with combinations of rusty cast-off letters and numbers. Now living with Eula, her sister, Louise spends her days arranging Cheerios and Scrabble tiles in varying designs as she awaits the next intrusion from outer space.
Serious and dedicated to protecting the seedlings in his care, Roger stoically accepts his unsought singleness. He also accepts squash casseroles and the solicitous ministrations of Meade and Hilma, two retired school teachers, best friends who have read aloud to each other "on their Thursday evenings in May" for the past 50 years. Meade is known for volunteering to cross-stitch the Christian symbol of a fish on 28 church kneeling cushions. Instead of sewing "the simple oval and triangle....she had sewn twenty-eight species of indigenous fish, all recognizable by little stitched details of form and color: warmouth perch, crappie, bluegill, large-mouthed bass."
Before long some dumpster cast-offs and their accompanying explanatory notes catch Roger's eye. They're the discards of Della, a visiting bird artist who has the temerity to enter a painting of chickens, albeit Dominiques, "to the most important wildlife art show in the world." He's a goner when he spies a fan and observes that she can spell "oscillate." As he says, "I admire good spellers."
While Roger can hold a grange meeting in thrall, volubly addressing "Living with Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus," his courting skills are negligible. Della leaves him "for the birds of the southern hemisphere." Thus, twice rejected and fragile he must face alone a party for the retiring dean of the plant pathology department. "Poor Roger," a sympathetic Hilma remarks, "having to entertain agricultural scientists and fry fish with a broken heart."
The world created by Bailey White, a raconteur with limitless wit, imagination, and good will, may seem implausible - a revisionist's description of life in small town America. Is there really a place where the local library's latest decor boasts a giant stuffed "white and black goose flying over the fax machine, its withered orange feet dangling into the paper tray," where women punctuate sentences by flapping their aprons, and where neighbors overlook past slights to care for one another? We can only hope so.
With the author's inspired eye for detail and gift for finding humor in the commonplace, Quite A Year For Plums is a generous, often hilarious, rendering of simple pleasures bursting with joy and down home joie de vivre. Ms. White is heard on National Public Radio - she is a national treasure.
- Gail Cooke
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Title: Mama Makes Up Her Mind : And Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White ISBN: 0679751602 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 April, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Sleeping at the Starlite Motel : and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home by Bailey White ISBN: 0679770151 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Among the Mushrooms: Selected Stories from NPR's Bailey White by Bailey White ISBN: 159040193X Publisher: Phoenix Audio Pub. Date: 09 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Turn South at the Next Magnolia : Directions from a Lifelong Southerner by Nan Graham ISBN: 192855623X Publisher: Coastal Carolina Press Pub. Date: 20 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Bless Your Heart, Tramp by Celia Rivenbark ISBN: 1928556221 Publisher: Coastal Carolina Press Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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