Helpful Score: 4
This was one of those books that when I had finished reading it, I found myself wondering how the characters were doing because they had seemed that real to me.
Helpful Score: 2
One of the best I have read............and trust me, I have read many books!
Helpful Score: 2
From Library Journal
Add newcomer Duncan to your reading list of Southern women writers. Set in western North Carolina, this first novel follows three generations of Moon women during the months of granddaughter Ashley's unplanned pregnancy. While both male and female characters resonate, this novel is definitely about the women as they struggle with relationships, roles, and their place in the world. Dialog is true to the region, and intertwined throughout are 80-year-old matriarch Marvelle's memories of her family and its secrets. Duncan expertly demonstrates that ordinary lives are worth illuminating. Her novel should make her mentor, author Lee Smith, proud and provide strong competition to another new regional novelist, Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap, Big Cherry Holler). Strongly recommended for all fiction collections.
Add newcomer Duncan to your reading list of Southern women writers. Set in western North Carolina, this first novel follows three generations of Moon women during the months of granddaughter Ashley's unplanned pregnancy. While both male and female characters resonate, this novel is definitely about the women as they struggle with relationships, roles, and their place in the world. Dialog is true to the region, and intertwined throughout are 80-year-old matriarch Marvelle's memories of her family and its secrets. Duncan expertly demonstrates that ordinary lives are worth illuminating. Her novel should make her mentor, author Lee Smith, proud and provide strong competition to another new regional novelist, Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap, Big Cherry Holler). Strongly recommended for all fiction collections.
Helpful Score: 2
The individual vernacular voices of the characters really resonate in Duncan's prose. You can hear her characters talking just as if you were sitting at their table with your own cup of coffee.
Helpful Score: 2
I enjoyed this book. A nice read about mothers and daughters, multigenerational, and how life has a way of circling about on you. I really liked the different generations and the viewpoints from each.
Helpful Score: 2
I like the relationships in this dysfunctional family. So realistic and makes me think of my own family. They have problems (as most folks do) but still love each other without question. I love the tough old granny. This is the first book I have read by this author; I like her style.
Helpful Score: 1
This was a great book,looking thru the lives of 4 woman in the same family
Pretty good read
Very good novel about a family who live in the North Carolina mountains.
Reminiscent of Karen Spears Zacharias' work, this novel deals with three-going-on-four generations of women in a small North Carolina town, dealing with the changes in their lives, and with the things that don't change.
Ruth Ann Pratt is reasonably happy, alone in the neat little house salvaged from her divorce from the philandering A.J. Her mama Marvelle, and younger sister Cassandra live just down the road in an uneasy truce made wobblier by Marvelle's tendency to come unmoored in time and wander off. When Ruth Ann's wild daughter, Ashley, returns home from rehab pregnant and moves back in, things begin to change rapidly.
Ruth Ann Pratt is reasonably happy, alone in the neat little house salvaged from her divorce from the philandering A.J. Her mama Marvelle, and younger sister Cassandra live just down the road in an uneasy truce made wobblier by Marvelle's tendency to come unmoored in time and wander off. When Ruth Ann's wild daughter, Ashley, returns home from rehab pregnant and moves back in, things begin to change rapidly.
In the lush North Carolina foothills, the Moon women have put down roots: matriarch Marvelle Moon, who's starting to lose her grip on the world after more than eighty years of life; her middle-aged daughters, Ruth Ann and Cassandra; and Ruth Ann's nineteen-year-old daughter, Ashley, fresh out of rehab, unmarried, and three months pregnant. Despite Ruth Ann's best efforts to live a life that's all her own, her family is coming together around her. Marvelle and Ashley need a place to live and Ruth Ann is unable to turn either of them away; and her womanizing ex-husband has been coming around again, dredging up the past. Now a flurry of outbursts, emotions, and outrages is shattering Ruth Anne's separate peace. And as this flawed family comes together, so, too, do the stories of the people Ruth Ann thought she knew best. For here is Ashley, who has spent nineteen years running furiously away from home, now finding herself on a strange journey with her unraveling grandmother. And here is Cassandra, protected by layers of obesity and loneliness, wondering how to put magic back in her life. And Marvelle, slowly losing tough with reality, privately contemplating the story of her life and the secret that would change everything for everyone--- if they only knew...
From the inside flap . . . "In the lush North Carolina foothills, the Moon women have put down roots; matriarch Mrvelle Moon, who's starting to lose her grip on the world after more than eighy years of life; her middle-aged daughters, Ruth Ann and Cassandra; and Ruth Ann's nineteen-year-old daughter, Ashley, fresh out of rehab, unmarried, and three months pregnant. Despite Ruth Ann's best efforts to lvie a life that's all her own, her family is coming together around her. Marvelle and Ashley need a place to live and Ruth Ann is unable to turn either of them away; and her womanizing ex-husband has been coming around again, dredging up the past."
