Helpful Score: 3
If you are a fan of the brilliant Reynolds Price's writings like I am, you will particularly enjoy this novel. He writes so beautifully, and so conversationally, that you feel like you are living with the characters right along with them. I admire such a novelist who can do this. The man can really tell a story!
Helpful Score: 1
This is an in-depth story of one woman's life which begins when she is a young woman and extends through her 90 years of living. It was amazing too me how well the author, who is a man, understood the trials and tribulations and ways of thinking that this woman had to endure and survive. I think I'd like to try another one of this author's books.
This read features Roxanna Slade, who lives a normal and unremarkable life in North Carolina. As the narrator, she shares her thoughts, experiences with a wayward husband, depressing times that take so much from her, and encounters with a mother in law whose goal is tormenting her. Her daughter becomes pregnant at age 13 but during Roxana's long life she finds love and happiness. The tale covers her life from age twenty into her middle nineties. It's a story that is told with emotion and depth and the reader begins to understand not only the relationships involved but also how the times in which an individual lives affect someone who lives such a long life.
Writing in Roxanna's voice, as he did with the heroine of the award-winning novel, "Kate Vaiden," Reynolds Price has produced a 'profoundly and provatively hope-filled book." Roxanna begins her story on her twentieth birthday- a day that introduces her to the harsh realities of adulthood and changes the course of her life forever. Her beguiling tale {of the following decades} is one that boldly reflects the high and low moments in the development of the modern South and the nation, as well as the inner strength of a woman possessed of a piercingly clear vision, forthright hungers and immense vitality.
