Helpful Score: 6
Isn't that just a great title? And for me, what a very beautiful story.
It didn't start all that fast, an old woman reminiscing, going back to her pre-war girlhood in Virginia. Just talking. She was beginning to lose me. And then suddenly I was loathe to put the book down, kept going back to it. Why? I can't say, for just like A Virtuous Woman, there seemed to be no plot. No action. No showing, just telling. But I am finding that with so much literary fiction nowadays. At least that which I am reading.
At one point, the book started bringing to mind The Oldest Living Confederate Widow. And that was before we reached the war. And that sense grew stronger as I read to the end of the book. Strange, since OLCW was full of action and this wasn't, and OLCW was huge and this wasn't.
Being dramatic here, I know, but reading the last page of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon just took my breath away.
It didn't start all that fast, an old woman reminiscing, going back to her pre-war girlhood in Virginia. Just talking. She was beginning to lose me. And then suddenly I was loathe to put the book down, kept going back to it. Why? I can't say, for just like A Virtuous Woman, there seemed to be no plot. No action. No showing, just telling. But I am finding that with so much literary fiction nowadays. At least that which I am reading.
At one point, the book started bringing to mind The Oldest Living Confederate Widow. And that was before we reached the war. And that sense grew stronger as I read to the end of the book. Strange, since OLCW was full of action and this wasn't, and OLCW was huge and this wasn't.
Being dramatic here, I know, but reading the last page of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon just took my breath away.
Helpful Score: 1
My favorite Kaye Gibbons book. This is Emma's story of life before and mostly during the Civil War. She tells us how her life was shaped by her abusive father and her loving mother in a household runned by slaves. Her escape from this environment and life after her marriage was spent suffering through the war with her doctor husband, sacrificing for the injured troops they nursed and for those they buried. A very compelling story.
Helpful Score: 1
This is a wonderful book about the South - or more particularly, the women of the South who have managed to live through the Civil War.It is told in 1900, on what the main character suspects may be her last day.
Helpful Score: 1
Slow start, but interesting story told well.
