I Am One of You Forever: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Flights of Boyhood Fancy
Review: Called a novel, "I Am One Of You Forever" is really a collection of short stories that are unified as the adventures of a 14 year old boy growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina. These stories cover the spectrum of human experience; love, tragedy, the supernatural, family, comedy. All the stories are made magical by the observations of the especially well-read and intelligent young narrator/persona.
Easily one of the funniest books I've ever read, I think I rarely went more than a page without a good laugh. The book also has some of the most poignant passages I've ever read, those dealing with the death (always a dominant theme in Southern literature).
A well-written book, Southern through and through, and appropriate for young teen-agers as well as adults. The book's title serves as the answer to a question posed as the story's last line, thus giving the book a wonderful circularity. Read this book; you won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: Everything but the beard
Review: This is a great book, and features some of the greatest trends in Southern Literature. The plot is good and the family is absolute funny. It will keep you laughing to the last page.

Rating:
Summary: Everything but the beard
Review: This novel, really a series of interconnected short stories about a boy growing up in western North Carolina in the 1940s, is my favorite so far by North Carolina's poet laureate Fred Chappell. The prose is simple, the characters are vivid and colorful, and the stories have depth. Chappell's style works best when the stories follow believable plot lines; his penchant for tall tales sometimes falls flat. I especially could have done without the chapter entitled "The Beard," even though I could see the metaphor Chappell was attempting to capture in that story. Other than that, I thought the book was sincere, funny, and often breath-taking. The finest moment for me was the chapter "The Wish," which encapsulates everything I would like to say myself about life in the Southern Appalachians. The book is worth reading just for that one chapter. I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys the works of such writers as Tony Earley, Charles Frazier, Robert Morgan, Kaye Gibbons, and Wilma Dykeman, although Chappell is funnier than all of them. Think a modern Mark Twain.

Rating:
Summary: A Magical, Wonderful Book
Review: This, the first in Fred Chappell's tetralogy of books about Joe Robert Kirkman and his family, consists of ten stories about ten-year-old (at the start of the book) Jess Kirkman's encounters with four of his mother's relatives, the live-in hired hand on the Kirkman farm, and some of their neighbors. Chappell's narration veers from straightforward fiction to fantasy, telling of the gusto and humor with which Joe Robert meets life. I found myself laughing out loud and slapping my knee at some of the passages, while being touched deeply by the novel's underlying theme of belonging to a family, a place, and a tradition.