Rating: 
Summary: A Slice of Delicious Southern Literary Pie!
Review: This is now one of my top five favorite books. The book reads like a screenplay, you can picture each chapter as clearly as a scene from a movie. The characters are so rich in southern culture and euphemisms, for me it brought back childhood memories of people and places long since forgotten. An amazing aspect of the book was the richness of the minor characters. They are deeply rounded and just as complete as the characters from the main storyline.
After the first 3 or 4 chapters, a reader will realize how enticing this book is. It draws you in slowly and soon you are aware that you want to race back to read even a couple of pages, much like I imagine a soap opera hypnotizes a viewer.
Rating: 
Summary: Pearl is a boy; his mother is a seer.....
Review: This novel is the story of 28-yr-old Even Grade who grew up as an orphan in Mississippi and Joody, a seer, the mother of Pearl (a grey-eyed male). Opening in 1956 in the magnolia state where the two meet; ending five years later (1961) in Alabama, the cotton state, when Pearl is four and his friend Sophy Marie (named after Sophocles) is three. She's the daughter of Grace and Cannan Mosley. Pearl had said, "Girls don't like to be bossed." She uses the Negro language of the fifties.When I was eleven, I had a half-sister named Mary Ruth Mosley whose mother died and, subsequently, the 3-yr-old child was adopted by someone from her mother's family. The name Mosley brought back memories of the loss of a little girl I loved very much. This is promoted as a tale of the search for identify and the power of renewal. It is based on one of the stories Ray Haynes passed on to his wife. She uses these quotes (which are signifigant): "Fate has terrible power. You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it" by Sophocles. "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders," by William Faulkner who knew the South and its inhabitants better than almost any other writer.
Rating:
Summary: Pearl is a boy; his mother is a seer.....
Review: This novel is the story of 28-yr-old Even Grade who grew up as an orphan in Mississippi and Joody, a seer, the mother of Pearl (a grey-eyed male). Opening in 1956 in the magnolia state where the two meet; ending five years later (1961) in Alabama, the cotton state, when Pearl is four and his friend Sophy Marie (named after Sophocles) is three. She's the daughter of Grace and Cannan Mosley. Pearl had said, "Girls don't like to be bossed." She uses the Negro language of the fifties. When I was eleven, I had a half-sister named Mary Ruth Mosley whose mother died and, subsequently, the 3-yr-old child was adopted by someone from her mother's family. The name Mosley brought back memories of the loss of a little girl I loved very much. This is promoted as a tale of the search for identify and the power of renewal. It is based on one of the stories Ray Haynes passed on to his wife. She uses these quotes (which are signifigant): "Fate has terrible power. You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it" by Sophocles. "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders," by William Faulkner who knew the South and its inhabitants better than almost any other writer.
Rating:
Summary: Not what it's cracked up to be!
Review: This story centers around two people: Even Grade and Valuable Korner. Even is an orphan. Valuable is the daughter of the town whore and an unknown father trying to find herself. Along this journey, she falls in love with a young man named Jackson who is acually a close relative of hers although neither of them are aware of it. Even is a working man who has made a life for himself in Mississippi with his good friend, Canaan, and flaky girlfriend, Joody, who is a fortune-teller. When Even and Valuable's paths cross about two-thirds into the book, they find something of themselves in the other and the story really begins to pick up and get interesting. Until then, however, it takes a lot of perseverance to keep reading. It took me about two months to read this book which is uncharacteristically long for me. The storyline is powerful, but the writing is atrocious. It's hard to get past bad writing sometimes and this was one of those cases for me.
| 
