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Summary: I laughed and I cried. Another Great one from Ms. Anne
Review: After reading some of the reviews of this book, I was a little concerned about it's content and whether I would like it or not. Now I say to you "Monday Night Quarterbacks", what were you reading? This was a wonderful book. Yeah, it's not a classic, but those of you who are familiar with Anne Rivers Siddons, knows that. This is also not "To Kill A Mockingbird" and should not be compared to it. To me, this is more about the characters and their stories. I loved Nora. She is spunky and not afraid to be herself and stick up for herself and what she believes in. She is also struggling with her past and tends to run away from it. Peyton is an enjoyable character as well. She grew into a little lady before our eyes.
I am a little confused as to the reason the housekeeper was referred to as both Clothilde and Chloe in the same breath. It took me a few pages to realize this was one person. I would love to ask the author why she did this.
This is a little different than most of Anne's books but I still loved it anyway. Well worth the read!!
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Summary: Eccentric Lives in the1960s: A Small Town in Georgia
Review: Anne River Siddons paints a wonderful portrait of a young girl growing up and coming of age into adulthood in a small town in Georgia during a time of innocence. After her eccentric cousin Nora comes to visit Peyton McKenzie, her life is turned topsy turvy and so are the lives of several other residents of the town. Peyton is on the verge of becoming a teenager, she never met anyone like Nora, who is independent and does not hesitate to challenge conventional thinking and the local establishment. Peyton harbors guilt for having killed her mother during childbirth, her mom died after she was born. Peyton belongs to an exclusive club, "The Loser's Club" ,where she and a few select friends share their 'secrets'. Peyton was raised by a single parent her father, who loves her but is somewhat remote. He has a housekeeper who also served as Peyton's nanny. Her highly particular Aunt Augusta (father's sister) took a benign interest in trying to feminize Peyton who resists these changes .... Peyton learns Nora is her mother's cousin's daughter and that a dispute between between the cousins, her mother and Nora's mother, occured sometime when Lila Lee (Peyton's mom) married her dad. Ms Siddons weaves numerous anecdotal events from the lives of her characters throughout the story ... many are amusing and charming which makes reading the book a delightful experience. Some mysterous events from the past eventually are revealed which shed light on the relationship between Peyton's and Nora's mother. Nora has some secrets of her own ... she lived a highly unusual independent life in her young adulthood. She is ahead of her time, the 1960s, in terms of civil rights, free thinking, and expresssion of personal freedom ... which she exerts. Her expressions of independence eventually land Nora into problems ... first with higher ups in the small town ... next with a past resident who made it to Hollywood and the big screen ... and eventually with Peyton's father who feels Nora is having a bad influence over Peyton.
The development of plot and characters is outstanding in this novel. The story is woven with finely honed skill. It unwinds to reveal how past secrets which were so safely guarded affect people's lives even today... Peyton learns how the lives of those loves are very complicated when the emotions and the heart are opened up. This is a highly recommended book. Erika Borsos (erikab93)
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Summary: Hallmark Presents
Review: Anne Rivers Siddons' most recent novel could better have been titled Peyton, Peyton. Although Nora is the catalyst for much of the action in this short novel, this is truly a coming-of-age story about a young girl,Peyton, growing into self-awareness and real life. As I progressed in the novel, I couldn't help but visualize sitting in front of the TV, watching this on the Hallmark Show. Can't you just see the beautiful Nora, in her pink convertible coming into the small town and turning everything and everybody into a tizzy? This is a fun,easy read but not Siddons best. It seemed to me that she was in a hurry to turn out another book, and didn't take the time to fully develop the characters. When she does, as in Up Island, she is magnificent!
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Summary: Wish I'd had an aunt like Nora
Review: For most readers of Nora, Nora, the title character will steal the show. A whiff of scandal accompanies Nora's arrival in Lytton, a sleepy, rural Georgia town. She smokes, cusses, and wears a T-shirt that says, "Jesus is coming. Look busy." It's 1961 and Nora wants revolution. She wants it now. She tries to railroad Lytton with change, teaching Tropic of Cancer in a public high school barely ready for To Kill a Mockingbird. Nora's seeming cynicism masks a more fundamental naivete. She believes that if she shows people the new horizons they hunger for, they will guard her secrets. That she is betrayed from almost every side is the novel's central heartbreak. Siddons has written a string of bestsellers, including Low Country and Outer Banks, whose titles reflect their Southern settings. The author's finest achievement in her new book may be with the character Peyton, a 12-year-old girl hovering unwillingly on the brink of adulthood in an era when gender dictated more rigid roles than it does now. Siddons accurately captures the impulse that leads even the best-hearted adults to make children over in their own image. One of the novel's funniest and most painful episodes is Peyton's trip to the beauty parlor, where tomboy Peyton is made over into a southern belle, complete with heavy makeup, under her aunt's iron hand. The next day, Peyton gets transformed, yet again, into the image of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's by her nightclub hopping, feminist cousin Nora. Nora, Nora effectively explores the extent to which people fail to change. The novel's three principle characters are trapped not only in the mores of a small southern town, which the civil rights movement threatens to leave behind, but also in their own individual comfort zones. Even Peyton's likable father, Frazier, a lawyer and advocate of integration, presses only so hard for badly needed reforms to Lytton's school and class systems. Change and transformation don't come as easily to people in real life as they do in the movies, and Siddons shows us that reality.
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Summary: Heartache and humor in the Deep South circa 1961!
Review: I am a huge ARS fan!! Some of her books are just plain "bad", but others are wonderful!! This is one!! The tried and true image of the "little lost soul" ie, Peyton, is quickly replaced by the strange, exotic, questionable character of Nora!! Nora breathes fresh air into Peyton's lonely life in small town GA circa 1961. Siddons' writing seems to capture the scene, the town, the era so beautifully!! I don't think she's ever written quite so discriptively!! And for those of you NOT from the South, she captures the true feeling of what it was like growing up in a small Southern town in the early '60's. As for Nora, Siddons has captured the true "free spirit" that people were afraid of, were in "awe" of, secretly admired, and generally distrusted!! She is not the "true lady of the South" by a long shot!! I found this really refreshing!!! And I know a "Nora" in my small Southern town upbringing!! I'm sure there were many more!!! A little different from the usual ARS, but well worth the read!!
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Summary: NICE STORY
Review: I found this book was not as good as others that this author has written.....A coming of age story that shows Peyton McKenzie as a shy 7th grader who is very lonesome.... Her mother died when she was born and she feels that she killed her. Peyton has no friends except for Ernie and Boot who are members of her "Loosers Club". Her father is kind to her and loves her, however. he does not spend much time with her. Peyton's prim Aunt Augusta is the one who has the resonsibility of instructing her how to become a proper southern lady with poor results....At this time, colorful, cigarette smoking Nora. Peyton's 3rd cousin. arrives one day in small quiet Lytton, Ga. driving her pink convertible Thunderbird. Nora moves in with the McKenzies and her energy just transforms this household. Peyton loves her cousin and blossoms into a lovely young lady....Nora takes a job teaching a segregated honors English class in high school, but the citizens of this small town do not like Nora's "wild ways". THis being the early sixties they are not willing to have segregation in their schools...Nora carries a deep secret from her past in her heart and she does finally reveal it to Peyton with the understanding that it will remain a secret with her...I think you will find this novel enjoyable and will love the characters.
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Summary: A Useful Read
Review: In Anne Rivers Siddons' book Nora, Nora, she captures the emotions of a 12 year old girl and unleashes them in a still racially-drawn South during the heat and turmoil of 1961. She sends a distant relative to relieve this girl of her pent-up preteen angst and of her father's sheltered life and changes it into something to talk about. Again Siddons has proven herself worthy of throwing herself into a life other than her own and turning it into something happy. With her colourful depiction and mysterious twist, Nora, Nora is a useful read that will soften hearts and bring a couple of laughs along the way.
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Summary: Atticus Finch where are you when we need you?
Review: OK in this latest long awaited book by the prolific Siddons, Southern Gothic runs amok. The curtain goes up on the life of Peyton McKenzie, wispy adolescent loser, whose proudest boast is that she killed her mother (died in childbirth, always a Dixie favorite). Daddy is a silent white male, who might as well be dead for all he adds to the action. There's a handicapped black child, a fat grave digger and a fey Scots grandma who shoos skeeters that aren't there. Also in the audience are the ghosts of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Kennedy Toole and Harper Lee. I'll tell you right now, they are eating jujubes and snickering at this over ripe story that should have been a young adult novel. (whoops, Truman just threw a martini glass, bad boy) Peyton's red headed cousin Nora comes to stay, shakes up the little town with her liberal politics and dirty mouth and then, unable to commit, runs off. Peyton and Daddy are left sadder but better for knowing her. Iam left wishing Anne Rivers Siddons had worked a little harder and written something more like DOWNTOWN or KING'S OAK.
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Summary: Shame on you Nora, and keep it up
Review: Take a somber seventh-grade tomboy on the edge of womanhood, a sullen father living mostly in his own sad little world, a weird grandmother who tells crows to go tell it to the devil, a pompous aunt who disdains anyone but the uppercrust, a black maid who makes scrumptious apple butter and tosses advice as quick as a salad, a motherless clubfooted black child, a church sexton and grave tender who reads classic books and listens to classical music, add in an assortment of other strange folks, then toss them all into a small town not far from Atlanta in early 1960's about-to-be-integrated Georgia, and you've got an interesting brew. Even better, add a spicy ingredient, such as an outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is, yellow-green eyed redhead named Nora, and you've got a hot new book from Anne Rivers Siddons. When cousin Nora rides into town in her 1955 pink Thunderbird, she cuts through both the melancholy and prejudice of smalltown Southern life, touching everybody in town in some way, especially her young tomboy cousin, Peyton McKenzie. But, in spite of her wild and wonderful powers, Nora brings with her a volatile secret, one that could destroy all that she's accomplished, and all she may want. "Nora, Nora" is a character-driven coming-of-age tale that satisfies.
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Summary: Slow Taking Off, But It Gets Better!
Review: The beginning of this book is just a little bit hard to get into as it talks about a spoiled rotten kid who felt she had everything to do with killing her mother.But when Nora arrives, the plot thickens and the story becomes much more entertaining and engrossing from there on. Anne Rivers Siddons has a way of writing with a different style with each book she composes, and this one though written well, is quite differently written then her others.
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