Search - Charms for the Easy Life

Some of this country's strongest women emerged from the Great Depression and WWII. This book celebrates those women and their relationships. I felt like I was wrapped up in a warm blanket listening to stories about my grandmothers. Gibbons lends a wonderful voice to the young Southern girl and weaves relationships that aren't ashamed to show their flaws. I now remember why I enjoyed reading Ellen Foster many years ago.

A very strange story set in the backwoods of North Carolina during the depression and WW2

A very moving book! another awesome Gibbons book:)

In the verdant backwoods of North Carolina, in a sad and singular era, the Birches are unique among women of their time-living gloriously rich it decidedly offbeat lives in a private world abandoned by men. And though misery often heats a path to their door, headstrong Sophia and her y, brilliant daughter Margaret possess charms to ward off loneliness and despair-thanks to the uncompromising strength, uncommon wisdom, and muscular love of a remarkable matriarch and self-taught healer who calls herself Charlie Kate.

In Charms for the Easy Life, Kaye Gibbons has created a luminous, truth telling novel that gives life to her most passionate and tough minded women yet.

I loved this book. It was the first book i have read by Kaye Gibbons and it certainly will not be my last. It was very well written and in an easy, conversational dialogue.

The book details the lives of grandmother Clarissa "Charlie Kate" Birch, a smart, stubborn, quirky, self-taught alternative healer/midwife, the mother, Sophia, the most romantic of the family, and main character and daughter Margaret, practical, intelligent, yet romantic- are unique, they stand out from the average woman of the 1930s-1940s of the South. Yet at the same time, they have the same basic desire, to be loved and respected, as anyone else.

The story is told from granddaughter Margaret's point of view but mainly centers around the grandmother, the “hero” of the family. Charlie Kate is the larger-than-life character, an "Ubermensch." Charlie delivers babies, heals with herbs, reads two books a week, saved a person from a lynching; sewed body parts together, treated malaria, and comforted the dying, along with directing the lives of her daughter & granddaughter.