Helpful Score: 3
I enjoyed this book, I thought it was good reading on the lighter side. I think a lot of women can identify with a woman midlife feeling disenchnated with what her life has become.
Helpful Score: 2
Quick read. Insightful, universally knowns, put in a new light. Original. Really like this author.
Helpful Score: 1
Not your typical southern fiction, but still very entertaining with unusual characters and great dialogue.
Helpful Score: 1
Jessie Maddox, 38-years-old, is having a mid-life crisis. Though married to a respectable and good man, she can't seem to find the happiness she thinks she should have. Jessie's questions on life ring true, and while I agree with some of her character's decisions, I disagree with others - but that's always true in life. It's a book that keeps your attention and raises some questions, but is not too heavy.
Helpful Score: 1
This book is sad and funny. A little slow to start, but it picks up and is a good read.
Helpful Score: 1
Very entertaining book in the tradition of "The Secret Life of Bees". Tragically, the author committed suicide a couple of years ago.
Interesting read - some of the main characters thoughts were a bit disturbing though. The author made me think!
Just okay for me, but well written.
Anne Rivers Siddons says "This may be the best first novel I've ever read." I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it's a good, readable story. If you love southern authors, you will most likely like this book.
I enjoyed this book. After reading the first few paragraphs i was a little shocked with the main characters frame of mind, regarding imagining her husband's death. However that also captivated me.
At 38, Jessie had a comfortable life in Glenville, Ga. So why does she keep picturing herself as the prfect grieving widow? this one will make you laugh all the way through . . and cry a little too.
Great book! A "normal" marriage and comfortable life - is this it? This is a good first novel.
I enjoyed it.
From Publishers Weekly
In this amiable expos of a genteel enclave of the Deep South, where marriages disintegrate into strained truces, 38-year-old Jessie Maddox finds herself imagining all the ways her faultlessly upright but mind-numbingly boring banker husband, Turner, might plausibly die. A fall in the shower? A freak explosion in the basement? Anything would do. In lieu of murderous action, Jessie seeks the same false sense of well-being she prescribes to her psychiatric patients at the Glenville Wellness Center, like Wanda McNabb, a homemaker who actually has killed her husband. Then Jessie's best friend in Glenville Meadows, a suburban subdivision full of "Southern Living wives," confesses that she is involved in a steamy affair, and Jessie finds herself desperate for any change at all. In an effort to recapture her youth, she journeys to her hometown in Randolph Gap, Ala., where her mother a maker of macram handbags and a fervent evangelical churchgoer still keeps house for her long-suffering father, and her wild sister, Ellen, is visiting with her son, Justin, and a full menagerie of birds. By contrast, dull Turner starts looking better. Finally, the gritty realities of smalltown limitations and universal disappointments steer the story away from a Thelma and Louise finale toward a more realistic but no less dramatic and ironic ending. Braselton's depiction of the plight of restless women and her brilliant descriptions of sheltered suburbia and smalltown life are delivered with scathing wit. (Oct. 2)Forecast: Blurbs from Anne Rivers Siddons, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith and Terry Kay suggest the slant and appeal of this novel, and should do much to capture readers' attention. An eight-city author tour and national print advertising will help.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
In this amiable expos of a genteel enclave of the Deep South, where marriages disintegrate into strained truces, 38-year-old Jessie Maddox finds herself imagining all the ways her faultlessly upright but mind-numbingly boring banker husband, Turner, might plausibly die. A fall in the shower? A freak explosion in the basement? Anything would do. In lieu of murderous action, Jessie seeks the same false sense of well-being she prescribes to her psychiatric patients at the Glenville Wellness Center, like Wanda McNabb, a homemaker who actually has killed her husband. Then Jessie's best friend in Glenville Meadows, a suburban subdivision full of "Southern Living wives," confesses that she is involved in a steamy affair, and Jessie finds herself desperate for any change at all. In an effort to recapture her youth, she journeys to her hometown in Randolph Gap, Ala., where her mother a maker of macram handbags and a fervent evangelical churchgoer still keeps house for her long-suffering father, and her wild sister, Ellen, is visiting with her son, Justin, and a full menagerie of birds. By contrast, dull Turner starts looking better. Finally, the gritty realities of smalltown limitations and universal disappointments steer the story away from a Thelma and Louise finale toward a more realistic but no less dramatic and ironic ending. Braselton's depiction of the plight of restless women and her brilliant descriptions of sheltered suburbia and smalltown life are delivered with scathing wit. (Oct. 2)Forecast: Blurbs from Anne Rivers Siddons, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith and Terry Kay suggest the slant and appeal of this novel, and should do much to capture readers' attention. An eight-city author tour and national print advertising will help.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
excellent, beautiful
A beautiful book, a great new author.
If you like to read about "southerners", you'll love this book. At thirty-eight, Jessie Maddox has a comfortable life in Glenville, Georgia, with the most reponsible husband in the world. But after the storybook romance, "happily ever after" never came. Now Jessie is left to wonder: Why can't she stop picturing herself as the perfect grieving widow? As Jessie dives headlong into her midlife crisis, she is joined by a colorful cast of eccentrics. There's her best friend Donna, who is having a wild adulterous affair with a younger man: Wanda McNabb, the sweet-natured grandmother who is charged with killing her husband; Jessie's younger sister Ellen, who was born to be a guest on Jerry Springer; their mother, who persistently corsses the dirty words out of library books; and of course, the stuffed green headless duck.
