Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #22

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Apr 082012
 

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Where the Heart Is
By Billie Letts
Oprah Book Club® Selection #22, December 1998

Editorial Review:

A funny thing happens to Novalee Nation on her way to Bakersfield, California. Her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Willie Jack Pickens, abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and takes off on his own, leaving her with just 10 dollars and the clothes on her back. Not that hard luck is anything new to Novalee, who is “seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight–and superstitious about sevens…. For most people, sevens were lucky. But not for her,” Billie Letts writes. “She’d had a bad history with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred…”

Still, finding herself alone and penniless in Sequoyah, Oklahoma is enough to make even someone as inured to ill fortune as Novalee want to give up and die. Fortunately, the Wal-Mart parking lot is the Sequoyah equivalent of a town square, and within hours Novalee has met three people who will change her life: Sister Thelma Husband, a kindly eccentric; Benny Goodluck, a young Native American boy; and Moses Whitecotton, an elderly African American photographer. For the next two months, Novalee surreptitiously makes her home in the Wal-Mart, sleeping there at night, exploring the town by day. When she goes into labor and delivers her baby there, however, Novalee learns that sometimes it’s not so bad to depend on the kindness of strangers–especially if one of them happens to be Sam Walton, the superchain’s founder. Continue reading »

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian – Oprah’s Book Club #21

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Apr 082012
 

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Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Oprah Book Club® Selection #21, October 1998

Editorial Review:

On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman’s terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn’t really dead when the midwife operated:

Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house. Continue reading »

Why the Oprah Book Club Collection?

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Apr 072012
 

I know that it looks like my blog has gone back to the late 1990s, but I assure you that it is temporary. Well, maybe not so temporary since at the pace that I am going it will probably take me (hmm, get out the calculator – click start, then run, type calc, ok – I love this thing) approximately 24 more days. Maybe even longer if I can’t manage to post two books a day. And if I do that, it means that I won’t be posting anything else but Oprah’s Book Club Selections for the next month. Last count, I think there were 67 selections, with the last one including two books. I’ve posted 20 Book Club Selections, so far, leaving 47 to go.

What’s the big deal about Oprah’s Book Club you ask? Well, it’s something that I started years ago, when Oprah first started her book club on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was maintaining a list of the book collection and even posted some of them on an old website. Somewhere along the way, I left it behind.

It has been said that because of Oprah’s Book Club popularity, many of the older/obscure titles became bestsellers and sales increased dramatically. It just shows you how much influence Oprah had on the reading public. A couple of her selections caused much controversy, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Read more at Wikipedia.org.

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What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #20

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Apr 062012
 

WImage of What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Dayhat Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Day
By Pearl Cleage
Oprah Book Club® Selection #20, September 1998

Editorial Review:

What makes Pearl Cleage’s novel so damned enjoyable? At first glance, after all, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day seems pretty heavy going: HIV, suicide, sudden infant death syndrome, and drunk driving all figure prominently in the lives of narrator Ava Johnson and her older sister Joyce. It isn’t long before crack addiction, domestic violence, and unwed motherhood have joined the list–so, where’s the pleasure? The answer lies in the sharp and funny attitude Cleage brings to her depiction of one African American community in the troubled ’90s. Ava Johnson, for example, might be HIV-positive, but she’s refreshingly forthright about it: “Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I’m not knocking it. I’m just saying I can’t be a witness. Too many titties in one place to suit me.”
Continue reading »

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #19

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Apr 062012
 

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I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.)
By Wally Lamb
Oprah Book Club® Selection #19, June 1998

Editorial Review:

What if you were a 40-year-old housepainter, horrifically abused, emotionally unavailable, and your identical twin was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed in public self-mutilation? You’d either be a guest on the Jerry Springer Show or Dominick Birdsey, the antihero, narrator, and bad-juju magnet of I Know This Much Is True. Somewhere in the recesses of this hefty 912-page tome lurks an honest, moving account of one man’s search, denial, and acceptance of self. This is no easy feat considering his grandfather seemed to take parenting tips from the SS and his grandmother was a possible teenage murderess, his stepfather a latent sadist, and his brother, Thomas, a politically motivated psychopath. Not one to break with tradition, Dominick continues the dysfunctional legacy with rape, a failed marriage, a nervous breakdown, SIDS, a car crash, and a racist conspiracy against a coworker–just to name a few.
Continue reading »

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #18

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Apr 052012
 

BImage of Breath, Eyes, Memory (Oprah's Book Club)reath, Eyes, Memory
By Edwidge Danticat
Oprah Book Club® Selection #18, May 1998

Editorial Review:

“I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to.” The place is Haiti and the speaker is Sophie, the heroine of Edwidge Danticat’s novel, “Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Like her protagonist, Danticat is also Haitian; like her, she was raised in Haiti by an aunt until she came to the United States at age 12. Indeed, in her short stories, Danticat has often drawn on her background to fund her fiction, and she continues to do so in her debut novel.
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Black and Blue: A Novel by Anna Quindlen – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #17

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Apr 052012
 

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Black and Blue: A Novel
By Anna Quindlen
Oprah Book Club® Selection #17, April 1998

Editorial Review:

“The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old,” begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. “Frannie, Frannie, Fran”–as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances–was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child.
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Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #16

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Apr 042012
 

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Here on Earth
By Alice Hoffman
Oprah Book Club® Selection #16, March 1998

Editorial Review:

Here on Earth is set in motion when March Murray and her teenage daughter travel from their California home to New England. Their stay is to be brief. Judith Dale, her childhood housekeeper-cum-foster mother, has died, and March must set things to right and get out of gloomy Jenkintown as quickly as possible. “Five days tops,” she reassures her scientist husband. Instead, she is pulled back into the arms of Hollis, her first love–an avaricious, Heathcliff-like individual who radiates sulfur and cruelty. “She left and didn’t come back, not even when he called her, and yet here she is, on this dark night; here and no place else.” In this deep fable of loss and control, love and fear, Alice Hoffman allows us into her characters’ cores and makes us wish their fortunes were happier. Here on Earth is filled with wisdom, what-ifs, and animals who seem, if not to know more than human beings, at least to know how to shy from danger. –This text refers to the Paperback edition. Continue reading »

Paradise by Toni Morrison – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #15

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Apr 042012
 

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Paradise
By Toni Morrison
Oprah Book Club® Selection #15, January 1998

Editorial Review:

Toni Morrison’s Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim “the one all-black town worth the pain.” Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison’s title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town’s pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town–or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. (“Before those heifers came to town,” the men complain, “this was a peaceable kingdom.”) One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.
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Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #11

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  1 Response »
Apr 022012
 

EImage of Ellen Foster (Oprah's Book Club (Pb))llen Foster
By Kaye Gibbons
Oprah Book Club® Selection #11, October 1997

Editorial Review:

Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel’s longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons’s case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.

In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as “old Ellen,” an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child’s body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative’s home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen’s tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage–and the occasional kindness of others–to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book’s bittersweet victory.



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