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Summary: Fly Your Coop: Read Michael Lee West
Review: If you read one book this year, read She Flew the Coop. It's wickedy funny, but it's also poignant, written with grace and depth. Fast paced and funny, SFTC is a crazy quilt of a novel, stitched with love. The book is full of recipes, and you can really cook them! Ms. West is a modern day Jane Austen, plunked own in the American South. You have to get down on your knees to find her in the bookstores, but it's worth the effort
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Summary: I adored this book.
Review: She Flew the Coop is one of the most entertaining books I've read in a long time. I suppose some of my appreciation for the book can be credited to having a mother from the South. The characters were all very vivid and remind me of people I've known. Despite the tragedy associated with the main character, Olive, the story has an upbeat ending with people getting what they deserve
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Summary: A sweet read
Review: The author creates a small town in Louisiana similar to the town in which she was raised. The characters and their lives are delightfully described, and the reader gets to enjoy the sadness and happiness of their small-town existence
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Summary: Terrible!
Review: This book is awful! I read it because of the good rating it has, but I can't figure out how all these people enjoyed it. I'm not hard to please, I read a lot of books and this is the first one I have ever given such a poor rating. I kept with it, hoping something interesting was about to happen, but it never did.
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Summary: Mercy!!!!
Review: This book has all the things found in a small southern town, sex, spousal abuse, gossip, town tramp etc. The graphic sex scene was a bit much for me, but the story overall was great. I grew up in the area of the fictional town of Limoges & found myself wishing it were a real town. If you like southern lit. this one is a winner.
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Summary: Raunchy read with almost too real scenes
Review: This is the second Michael Lee West novel I have read this week. I liked "Crazy Ladies" a lot, but this volume, despite its graphic scenes of sex and violence is an artful piece of writing. There is a lot of talent in West's prose, as her characters seem larger than life, though real. And, again, this is a novel about strong women and their men, of whom there are MANY feet of clay.The Nepper family, with Vangie, Henry, and Olive, are the core of the book. Vangie is a poignant woman whose naivete shields her from seeing the truth about her daughter and her husband, but who finally flies the coop and demonstrates her strength when she has had enough. It is Vangie who keeps the home fires burning, and her flower gardens growing, who assumes her pharmacist husband is the faithful, truthful man she believes she married. Together Vangie and Henry face the suicidal poisoning of their only child. Apart, when Henry has violated all the principles of his wedding vows by falling in total lust with DeeDee Robichaux, each meets his own destiny. The town's solidarity around the lone Baptist church sets up the downfall of the hypocritical church leader, the young, and dashing bachelor preacher, Reverend T. C. Kirby, whose personal secrets lurk in the background, as he seduces women of all ages to suit his own devilish whims. The right and wrong social sides of town are made clear, with the tragic Robichaux family living among the outcasts of Hayes Street, and the Neppers, Galliards, Hoopers, and LeGettes residing as neighbors on Cypress Street across from the oxbow of water known as Lake Limoges. In the fictional Limoges, all streets are either named for U. S. Presidents or for flowers and trees. Linking all the upper and lower class families together are the children, especially red-haired Billie Robichaux, the enterprising daughter of DeeDee and her miserable Korean War veteran Reney, now a wheel-chair bound paraplegic. DeeDee's Aunt Butter is their landlord. Butter, owner of a town eatery, provides a home for the ingrates that are DeeDee and Reney. She sacrifices her home's sanctity for the drunken destruction of Reney who feeds off the hatred he has for DeeDee, his whoring wife. Butter is the refuge that Billie deserves, however. And Billie, in her efforts to survive her poverty and the dysfunction of her parents, finds ways to work for the well-off ladies of Cypress street. Knitting the families of Cypress together is Sophie Donnell, the black maid to Vangie Nepper, Waldean LeGette, Harriet Hooper, and Edith Galliard. Sophie is the ultimate survivor, as she is the brutally abused wife of Burr, a wife-beater any reader will love to hate. As a day maid and cook, Sophie, knows the business of all the households, and they in turn wonder why she continues to take Burr's abuse, even sheltering her whenever they can. She is one of the noble characters of the novel. Israel, the black mortician's helper at Beaulieu's is another noble character. As an old bachelor, he does his work taking in the dead to prepare for burial, and lives a solitary life of independent respectability. There is rich humor in this book, some of it laugh out loud in nature, a great comic relief to the rougher scenes. An especially endearing comic narrative comes from the owner of the town's funeral home, Cab Beaulieu, as he explains his sexual history. Even more delightful is his encounter with Vangie's sister-in-law, and his neighbor, the widowed older woman, Edith Galliard. His entanglement with this widow is one he cannot escape. Each part of this novel is laced with the real heart of life in northeastern Louisiana in 1952, the recipes that feed the very soul of the populace. Those recipes reveal the joy of food, the importance of its sustenance in a story that is rich and calorie laden. Third person chapters are interspersed with first person narratives of the many characters. In these narratives, West executes exceptional skill. The voice and dialect of each person according to their race, class, age, is right on the mark. One feels like they have lived four months of 1952 in Limoges, learning its most human secrets, good and evil. These people of West's fiction are hauntingly real, just like the recipes that they share.
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Summary: Move OVER Ya-Ya's
Review: If you want to read a very WELL WRITTEN, quirky, sincere, sad and funny-at-the same-time book about the South, give this one a whirl. Give all of Micheal Lee West's books a whirl. I hate that it will take a movie deal to get her books out on the nightstands of ladies everywhere but... whatever it takes!
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Summary: Our 4th Reading Selection
Review: We read this book in July of 2002 and our average rating rounded out to 4 stars. This book is set in the steamy southern town of Limoges Louisiana where gossip rules, everyone knows your business sometimes even before you do. Most of us didn't like the people of this town there were very few that were likable, with the exception of one little girl Billie. Most of us thought the this was a good book and here are some random comments from our members, "Just like a good Soap Opera", "Captivating", and "an amazing jewel of Southern fiction"
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Summary: Limoges is where gossip rules
Review: She Flew the Coop is the first book I have read written by Michael Lee West and I enjoyed it so much that I'm planning on reading American Pie. The story was able to captivate me even though I really didn't like most of the characters in this book. My favorite character was a little girl named Billie, who had a terrible domestic life but seemed to overcome this obstacle and represented hope for the citizens of this town. Limoges Louisiana is a town where gossip rules and the wholesome life is anything but wholesome. Adultery, wife beating and even the town's minister is raping young girls are some of the problems this town faces but its the gossip that I consider its doom. There is one part where the author compares gossip to a disease spreading that I thought was brilliant. This book was captivating and I enjoyed reading this one even though I couldn't like more than two or three character, but the story is what we will keep you interested. The recipes sounded good and I loved the way the author inserted them into the book as if they were part of the story. I would recommend reading She Flew The Coop.
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