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Summary: Great for a book group
Review: If you thought Cold Mountain was a good story, you'll like On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon for different reasons. Whereas Mountain was a love story, Occasion is one woman's story. Easy read, believable, entertaining. A good choice for a book group--mine gave it a thumb's up.
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Summary: "On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon" by Kaye Gibbons
Review: I recently read the historical fiction novel, "On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon" written by Kaye Gibbons. I found the novel to be both interesting and factual. I chose the novel in the first place because I had to do a book report for my high school history class on a novel from the civil war period. Many of the events we have been studying in class showed up in this book. Also it was a wonderful first-hand account of how a women might live her life in this time period. Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good historical fiction novel.
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Summary: Tears ran down my face
Review: It is a lovely book, poignant and sincere. I thoroughly enjoyed my reading. I recommend this book to anyone who may have even the slightest interest in the American Civil War and in the people (fictional and real) who lived through it.
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Summary: Beautiful, Kaye Gibbons at her finest prose and most tragic
Review: This, Gibbon's latest work, is not her best, or perhaps a better way of saying it would be, her most literary, but it shows a side of this Southern author that was hiding in most of her earlier works. I've read the book several times, and though I am a male, I am a Southerner, and the book gives my shivers every time. It is the most beautifully tragic book I have ever read. (Shakespeare wrote plays, not books.) Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is, like most of Gibbons' main characters, strong, insightful, but none of the others have endured as much hardship as she has. The prose is, as usual, pitch-perfect, and though the characters are not greatly subtle in a post-modern way (to which we have perhaps become *too* accustomed), they are classic morality studies in themselves. This one blows GONE WITH THE WIND out of the water for Southern Romances. Kaye Gibbons is a consumate storyteller, and ON THE OCCASION OF MY LAST AFTERNOON is a stunning book.
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Summary: Compelling style despite glaring historical inaccuracies
Review: Kaye Gibbons has a very breezy, readable style, and she has managed to capture very well the phrasing used in writings of the ante- and post-bellum period. I only wish her research had been done more carefully. As a long-time Virginia resident, I can safely say that her sense of the geography of this state is confused at best and downright wrong at its worst. She is also incorrect when she tells of wounded soldiers being transported from Gettysburg and Antietam all the way to Raleigh so that they can undergo surgery at the hands of the main character's husband. No soldier needing surgery would ever have made it such a great distance, and the railroads were in such a dismal state that the Confederacy could not have transported desperately wounded men that far, even if it had had a mind to. Wounded men were generally treated in farmhouses and churches and barns nearest the battlefield. However, her portrayal of hospital conditions is accurate, and her knowledge of medicine is impressive. Her characters, although interesting, are a little two-dimensional -- either tolerant and good and wise, or abusive and narrow-minded. No one is depicted with the usual beauties and warts we generally find in humans. It is a testament to the strength of Gibbons' style that I enjoyed reading the book despite these glaring problems.
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Summary: What a let down
Review: Having read and enjoyed all of Gibbons' other books and I looking forward to this one. My stepfather read it first and loved it. I, however, did not. I didn't even finish it. It just wasn't as interesting as her other books. I just wasn't drawn in by the characters or the writing
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: Okay, I want to know what they have done with the real Kaye Gibbons - a woman who truly knows how to write. I am convinced she didn't pen this book. I kept checking to see if that really was her name on the cover. This was such a disappointment! I've read four of her five previous works and I am breathless to think that the woman who wrote Ellen Foster also wrote this flat, predictable, even annoying novel. These are some of the most one-dimensional characters ever, the situations often don't ring true and the moralizing becomes cloying. It is not up to Ms. Gibbons' standards as a writer, and not up to my standards as a reader.
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Summary: A Step back in time.....
Review: This was my first experience with Ms. Gibbons writings. I had the fortunate experience of listening to this book on audio. read by Polly Holliday, better known as "Flo" from the 70's series "Alice". She had a range with all of her voices which allowed characters as Emma Garnet, Clarice and the horrible Samuel P. Tate come to life as I drove down the interstate. I had just returned from a trip touring Civil War Battlefields in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania. This book brought me to those places in my mind as they really were. Gibbons portrays Emma Garnet as a sympathetic, yet strong woman as she ventures further into her life with her beloved Quincy. If I had a criticism of this novel, it would be this. Could Emma Garnet have any MORE people in her life die during the span of the book? As each death occured (if I spoil anything for future readers, I humbly apologize) I thought to myself, "Can anyone survive to keep this woman going?" But all in all, I very much enjoyed the ride. It was portrayed at a brisk pace and I was spellbound the entire 5 hour length of the audio cassette.
Rating:
Summary: somehow disappointing
Review: i fell in love with kaye gibbons writing when i read ellen foster -- her writing encapsulated everything i love about southern literature. easy prose -- but not simplistic, a great story, and memorable, wonderful characters. emma garnet and all the characters in "my last afternon" read like caricatures. the whole story has a shallowness that i wasn't expecting. it's like kaye gibbons had this wonderful idea, but just coudn't quite realize it in writing. none of the characters were particularly believable. her father was too horrible -- with no redeeming features, and her husband was too annoyingly perfect -- as were her chidren and her idyllic life as a married woman. the fact that she did not tell her servants that they were free did not, in fact, make me like her less, but was an indication that the author was trying to create a believable narrator that was a product of her time, rather than the creation of a 20th century mind. but that only exists as a hint.
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Summary: Gibbons' characters remain long after the book is over
Review: Ever since I heard Kaye Gibbons speak at an authors' event, I knew I would like anything she wrote. At the event she told, in a cool, lilting accent, of how she was seized by an attack of nausea at another speaking engagement. She was forced to rush offstage and was throwing up in the ladies room when someone came to get her body microphone off. Apparently her vomiting was being broadcast throughout the auditorium!Her story of such an embarassing event was very funny, very sad, and completely engrossing. Her ability to tell a story, ANY story, is simply marvelous, and this book again shows her talents in a bright light. Still, I was a bit disappointed in the ending of the book. As others have indicated, it wrapped up a bit too quickly and left me wondering why. I, too, felt that perhaps there was a longer book in there, but it had been cut off at the knees, so to speak. On The Occasion of My Last Afternoon is probably not Kaye Gibbons best work, but nonetheless it is very satisfying. The cool,lilting Southern voices of her characters remain with the reader long after the final page is turned.
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