The Member of the Wedding Author:Carson McCullers Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. Even her father calls her a great big long-legged 12-year-old blunderbuss, and the friendless girl spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle and wise family cook and housekeeper. Frankie's jealousy of her brother's impend... more »ing marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, reinventing herself as the seemingly sophisticated F. Jasmine, a gawky beauty in a pink dress who looks closer to 16 than 12. But she's ill prepared for what follows from this troubling game of make-believe. Carson McCullers captures the universal in the particular in this sensitive, nuanced portrayal of one girl's struggle into adulthood.« less
I thought this was excellent, kind of melancholy. I could really identify with the young main charater, feeling like there had to be something more exciting than her life right around the corner. The way her thoughts are revealed is so raw and believable.
This southern fiction classic is a dreamy, hazy meandering walk through an unnamed southern town in an unnamed southern state (although I suspect it to be the author's home state of Georgia) through the eyes of an imaginative 12-year old during World War II. The characters were developed superbly and the use of language was creative and unexpected. With all the focus on The Help these days, it is hard not to pay attention to the characterization of Berenice, the family's black maid, and her relationship to Frankie and John Henry. These relationships were central to the story. McCullers presents Berenice with a genuineness and honesty that would have been difficult to achieve in a contemporary work of southern fiction. McCullers was writing about her times at the time and this results in less cliche and, instead, feels very real.
Delightful! The main character, F. Jasmine, reminds me in many ways of the heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird. Not as dramatic a novel, it is of the maturation of a young girl in the deep South.
