nomadreader

The backstory: The debut novel of Ayana Mathis,  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie , was one of the spring 2013 releases I was most excited about. When Oprah picked it as her second Book Club 2.0 read and pushed up the book's release date, I moved it to the top of my queue. The basics: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie  is the life story of Hattie Shepherd. It spans from 1925 to 1980.When she fifteen, Hattie, her mother and sister moved from Georgia to Philadelphia. There she married soon after and gave birth to twins: the first of many, many children. My thoughts: The first chapter of this novel is devastating and heart-wrenching and still somehow hopeful. Both of Hattie's twins are sick with pneumonia in the middle of the night. Mathis shifts from the current minutes to Hattie's memories beautifully. In the second chapter, however, the action shifts, both in time and narrator. Suddenly it's 1948, and Hattie's son Floyd is a musician traveling through the South. My unders...

The basics: A Good Hard Look takes a good hard look at Milledgeville, Georgia and its quirky cast of characters, including Flannery O'Connor. My thoughts: It's no secret I often adore novels with real people as characters. A fictional look at Flannery O'Connor and the town of Milledgeville (and likely the inspiration for some of her own fiction)? I was sold. Imagine my surprise when Flannery was my least favorite part of this novel. She was fine, but either Napolitano was afraid to emphasize the character of Flannery or she assumed her readers would bring that knowledge to this novel. There's certainly an argument for either, but in this novel, the rest of the ensemble shined. The novel opens with the wedding of Cookie and Melvin, a New Yorker moving to Milledgeville to make his wife happy. Cookie hated New York and wanted to come home. Melvin's parents are dead, and he is wealthy enough to have options. Cookie has a firm dislike of Flannery, and Melvin initi...