Folly Beach: A Lowcountry Tale ~ Dorothea Benton Frank

Folly Beach: A Lowcountry Tale
By Dorothea Benton Frank

I must admit that I’m only a little more than halfway through this book but I have been enjoying it and I wanted to share one of my favorite authors, Dorothea Benton Frank. What I love best about her books are their great sense of place, Carolina Lowcountry, and the vivid characters. Folly Beach does not disappoint.

Cate Cooper’s husband has recently committed suicide, leaving her to face the lies that their life was built upon – a house mortgaged to the hilt, incredible debt, a business that is pretty well sunk and a child by another woman. Cate finds out that even her engagement ring diamond is a fake. She decides to go back to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, to Folly’s Beach. Aunt Daisy, who practically raised her, is in need of a little help herself.

A couple things did bother me with this book. Early on, the narrator recalls, “We were gathered in the most inclement conditions February in New Jersey could offer to bury Addison, my husband of too many years.”

No, you weren’t, because the most severe conditions available in February would be a blizzard and you definitely wouldn’t be in a cemetery burying someone under those circumstances. You might not be on any other day in February. The ground is usually rather frozen and the deceased is often kept in storage until the ground can be dug for burial.

Perhaps we could put this down to the character’s tendency to dramatize but I don’t feel like that’s established on page 7 or that it is ever that severe again. I’d say it’s a matter of someone writing about a setting they aren’t very familiar with. Disconcerting but the premise was interesting, so I kept going and thankfully she moves South to familiar territory very soon.

The other minor problem I had was that the story is told in alternating chapters. One chapter is told from Cate’s perspective and the next is told from the imagined perspective of a play Cate writes about Dorothy Heyward. (Cate ends up staying in the house where Dorothy and Dubose Heyward once lived on Folly Beach in South Carolina and becomes very interested in them.) I enjoyed the two lines of story equally but found it a bit distracting, or perhaps annoying would be more accurate, to flip back and forth. It might not have bothered me so much if my reading wasn’t already disjointed by the pockets of time I have to read. I only get to read two chapters at a time and so I never get to read much of each story line in one sitting.

These are minor details though and haven't kept me from reading and enjoying Folly Beach. I also did a little checking on the Porgy House, where so much of the action takes place that it almost becomes another character. I came across an article from the Charleston Post and Courier which describes the Porgy House and shows photographs after it was purchased and restored in the late 90's. (Porgy House Available for Tours on Folly Beach) I do love it when history comes to life.

I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed each of Dorothea Benton Frank’s books equally, or that this is even my favorite, but the characters are always engaging and the setting is usually vividly depicted in her Lowcountry books. I’d highly recommend her first, Sullivan’s Island, but all of the books are stand alones. They are addicting, dramatic and highly entertaining – the best of Chick Lit. Not quite a soap opera, more like a girlfriend telling you ALL about her life.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future
By Michael J. Fox

Michael J. Fox will long be remembered as Alex Keaton in the 80’s sitcom, Family Ties, and the star of the science fiction movie Back to the Future. Others may remember him from the later sitcom Spin City or the fact that he developed Parkinson’s Disease and became a leading advocate for finding a cure. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that he is a supremely articulate and literate individual as well.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future is a very short book, only 100 pages, succinct but thoughtful. It is geared towards high school graduates, embarking on a college education, but sums up some important points we could all stand to be reminded about.

Fox has several honorary degrees, “which puts me on equal academic footing with the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.” A high school dropout with a purpose, he finally took his GED when his son was ready to enter kindergarten.

“Just to reassure you, I’m not one of those swaggering jerks who, having achieved success after dropping out of school, promotes the fiction that a higher education is a complete waste of time. All the same, I sometimes employ my lack of academic standing as a subtle goad to those who would make character judgments based solely on one’s alma mater or post-graduate degree.” Nevertheless, he is an avid reader and learner.

Self deprecating in every respect, he pulls lessons from the school of hard knocks in economics, literature, physics, political science and geography. He also extols the virtues of finding mentors along the way.

Speaking of what his time on Family Ties and the Executive Producer, Gary Goldberg, taught him he says, “Show up to work on time, learn my lines, respect the writers, strive with every performance, every scene, every line, to improve on what I had done before: these were the standards that Gary expected me to meet. It was an ethic that I understood. It was basically my father’s.”

This could be applied to basically any work we do in life. With everything we do, strive to improve on what we have done before. His mentor taught him an equally important but perhaps more esoteric concept as well. “To this day, the word that comes to mind when I think of Gary is “gratitude.” None of us is entitled to anything. We get what we get, not because we want it or we deserve it or because it’s unfair if we don’t get it, but because we earn it, we respect it, and only if we share it do we keep it.” Profoundly simple.

At age thirty, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and told he would only be able to work for about ten more years. It certainly made him sit up and take notice of the fact that others go through such direction altering life changes too. “Life is good, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be – right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).”

Fox took some detours but came to some conclusions that changed how he addressed the issue of his Parkinson’s. “The reality is that things change; the question is, how will I perceive that change, and am I willing to change along with it?”

He offers some life lessons in simple form. “Life is not linear. There will be detours along the way. For the curious, new clues will await at every turn and may keep pointing toward the chosen destination. Or maybe you’ll stumble upon information that will inspire you to change course altogether, delivering you to a future you never could have imagined.”

Unfortunately, those most in need of the truths he offers won’t recognize them until it hits them between the eyes. So, he offers one simple statement to sum it all up. Stay aware and, “Live to learn.”

I have heard friends sneer at books by celebrities but I have always believed everyone has a story to tell. You can't discount good advice simply because it comes from someone you believe to have the advantages in life. They have to deal with difficulties too. I wish the book had been longer but at least I know there is other writing he has done which I can look forward to.

The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love ~ Jill Connor Browne

The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love:
A Fallen Southern Belle’s Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage, and Being Prepared
By Jill Conner Browne

“For anyone even remotely familiar with Jackson, Mississippi, the name “Sweet Potato Queens” instantly evokes sweet memories of beautiful, somewhat augmented female forms enveloped in green sequins, towering red hairdos, provocative dances, and the haunting refrain of “Tiny Bubbles,” as only Don Ho could – or would, for that matter – deliver it. If, as they say, you ain’t from around here, you need some enlightening; and your life will not be complete until you get it. Nor will it ever be the same after you do.”

Ahem, there is nothing “somewhat” about the augmentation, as you can tell from the cover of this book. It is pure fun, from the title and cover to the recipes in the back for Chocolate Stuff and Armadillo Dip. It is sitting down with a girlfriend and having a few drinks while you tell the most outrageous stories you’ve ever heard or experienced in your life. It is positively irreverent and may be giving away the secrets of all women kind but no man will ever pick it up anyway.

The Sweet Potato Queens began as a float for the Jackson, Mississippi St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Considering the outrageous nature of the behavior, the women decided that they needed to do something to maintain some anonymity so they held a meeting to pick names but everyone wanted to be called Tammy. To be fair, they decided to ALL be Tammy.

The great thing about the Sweet Potato Queens is that while other beauty queens only get to be one for a year and have to do all sorts of things for the privilege, “Sweet Potato Queens, on the other hand, don’t have to do jackshit that anybody says, and we are Queens for Life.”

The titles of each chapter is thoroughly explanatory, such as “The True Magic Words Guaranteed to Get Any Man to Do Your Bidding.” The true secret is one that cannot be spoken out loud or at least absolutely not in mixed company. And it is not something a Queen follows through on. It is simply held out there in the hopes that one day, far in the future, she will follow through on the promise.

Then there is “The Best Advice Ever Given in the Entire History of the World.” It is incredibly simple, just two words, but not to be underestimated. “Consider, if you will, the profound effect that following advice would have on, say, your diet, your love life, your financial situation, your decision on whether to have that next drink. I mean, what do those two words not cover?” You’ll just have to read the book to find out what it is.

Other chapters include, “Be Prepared on Account of You Just Never Know,” “He Ain’t Nothin’ But a Man: You Better Have a Good Defense,” and “Men Who May Need Killing, Quite Frankly.”

It is the battle of the sexes told in a humorous light and with great dollops of southern charm. Just when you’re having a grand old time, laughing so hard you might just pop a stitch, she sneaks a little down home wisdom in too. Enjoy.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adams

Few people realize that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was actually first written as a radio series and broadcast starting in 1978 on BBC radio.  The first book didn’t come out until fall of 1979.  Since then, it has had a long and varied life.  (If you’ve seen the modern movie, please don’t judge it by that.  While it’s entertaining to some degree, it comes nowhere near the brilliance and humor of the radio series or book.)

Of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is also a book within the book.  Its major selling point is that on the front of it, in large friendly letters, is written Don’t Panic.  The guide is quoted frequently. 

It includes tips on the use of a towel for interstellar travel, such as wetting it for hand-to-hand combat, or wrapping it around your head to “avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous.” 

Or the entry which mentions how ballpoint pens escape, “… it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid life-style, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life.”

The story begins on Earth.

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Things get better, but only momentarily.

“...one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”  Sadly, the Earth is demolished before she can get to a phone.

Before the actual demolition, our antiheroes make their appearance.  Arthur Dent is having a really bad day.  He’s just found out that his house is slated to be demolished to make way for a bypass.  Then he finds out his best friend, Ford Prefect, is not even from Earth and the Earth is slated to be demolished for an interstellar bypass.  Luckily he and Ford manage to hitch a ride on the ship come to do the job.  Of course, they later get tossed off the ship but they do, very improbably, get picked up by Ford’s distant cousin Zaphod and his girlfriend Trillian. 

Zaphod has stolen the ship they are on, which runs on the Infinite Improbability Drive. This drive causes very improbable things to happen when in use, such as calling into existence a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias high over a planet. 

Trillian is also a girl who Arthur, very improbably, happened to hit on at a party years before when her name was Tricia McMillan.  Along with an incredibly depressed robot named Marvin, “And then of course I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side,” they go in search of legendary Magrathea, where Earth was planned and built, paid for by the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings Earthlings know as mice. 

Full of humor and pithy sayings, like “Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so,” this is not the type of book that you will ever pick up and wonder if you’ve already read it.  It is the type of book you will want to read again though.

The library offers both the books and the original radio drama on CD.  Though containing the same main story, they are different enough that I highly recommend checking out both.  My husband and I took the CDs for a very enjoyable ride to Massachusetts and back one year.

The Sugar Queen ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The Sugar Queen
by Sarah Addison Allen

The first thing that meets the eye when you pick up a book is, of course, the cover, and the covers of Sarah Addison Allen’s books are lushly beautiful.  The Sugar Queen cover shows a young woman curled up on a window seat with big purple pillows and an open book, looking out into the woods - an enticing vision for any lover of books.  I’ll admit, covers often factor into whether I will pick up a book to begin with.  However, that is not why I picked up this book.  No, it was because of the most effective marketing for books ever introduced, word of mouth.  It was recommended to me by one of our library volunteers.  The cover was just a bonus.    

The Sugar Queen centers around four couples.  Josey, who lives in a big house helping to care for her mother, is secretly in love with the mailman, Adam.  She fills the void with sweet treats and romance novels at night.  Then Della Lee Baker takes up residence in her closet, hiding from her abusive boyfriend Julian, and starts pushing Josey out into the world, into new experiences. 

Josey meets Chloe at the sandwich shop she owns.  Chloe is stalked by self-help books, they simply appear whenever they have something to tell her such as Finding Forgiveness.  Her boyfriend, Jake, cheated on her and Chloe broke up with him but she is struggling with how much she still loves him. 

Finally, Josey’s mother Margaret has been in love with the local cabdriver, Rawley, for forty years.  In fact, they were once lovers, but now he never speaks to her.

Allen makes much of the interconnectedness between the couples, intertwining the stories further, giving the story a small town feel.  It turns out Josey’s new friend, Chloe, is good friends with Adam, who is also a friend of Jake.  Then Julian and Chloe meet at a bar and Julian begins charming Chloe, in stalker fashion.

Full of Southern charm, romance and magical realism cross paths in the books of Sarah Addison Allen.  The Sugar Queen is sweet and short but with surprising depth.  I highly recommend it.

Blue Highways ~ William Least Heat Moon

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

By William Least Heat Moon

I first picked up Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon from the book exchange shelf of the English Department when I was in college.  It has remained one of my top ten favorite books since that time.

The opening lines are some of the most intriguing I have found in any book.  I copied them down and have read and re-read them over the years, “Beware thoughts that come in the night.  They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.”  I have always found this to be true but in a useful way, clearing away the inhibitions that held back my best writing.

The adventure started in the late 1970’s when William Least Heat Moon took his truck, Ghost Dancing, on a circuitous route around the United States, sticking to the old “blue highways,” the less traveled roads that were marked in blue on the map, where people lived.  He was a thirty-eight year old English professor who had just lost his job and realized his estranged wife wasn’t coming back.

“Call me Least Heat Moon,” he introduces himself.  “My father calls himself Heat Moon, my elder brother Little Heat Moon. I, coming last, am therefore Least.  It has been a long lesson of a name to learn.”

Perhaps it was his simple rating scale that started my fascination with mom and pop diners -

“No Calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.

One Calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.

Two Calendars: Only if fish trophies present.

Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfasts.

Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too.

Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.”

The beauty of the land he describes has made me want to pack up and take off every time I re-read it, “I went to the Trace again, following it through pastures and pecan groves and tilled fields; wildflowers and clover pressed in close, and from trees, long purple drupes of wisteria hung like grape clusters.” 

He encounters people all along the way and shares their wisdom in their own words, like the delightful conversation with the waitress in the three calendar café where he is served a biscuit with a smiley face button on it because he looked like he needed one.  The waitress asks what he’s looking for and he responds at last with “harmony.”  She tells him, “I started out in life not likin’ anything, but then it grew on me.  Maybe that’ll happen to you.”

The author deftly weaves the interesting bits of conversation with haunting descriptions.  “It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread.”

It is this blend of philosophy, introspection, descriptions of land, people, architecture and explanations of the history that built it all which give the book its’ distinctive feel.  It is a slow book for deep reading, perfect for the coming winter.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ~ Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot

I’ve always enjoyed books which teach me something as well as telling a good story.  Usually I find that in fiction books where the author has something to share which they have researched or learned.  With The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a spellbinding story intertwines with both a history and a science lesson. 

The author first heard about HeLa cells when she was 16.  She became fascinated, wondering… who was the woman behind the cells that helped develop the polio vaccine, revolutionized cancer treatment and helped in every endeavor from in virtro fertilization to cloning?  Her search for Henrietta Lacks led her to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who had the same questions but many more.  Most of all though, Deborah wanted to know who her mother was.  Together they investigated.

Henrietta Lacks was a thirty year old mother of five in 1951 when she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital and was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer.  At that time the treatment involved using radium placed into the uterus to kill the cells.  When the treatment didn’t work, Henrietta died, painfully.  But all of her cells didn’t die with her.  A biopsy of the tumor provided the first cells capable of being kept alive in a lab.  They were named HeLa after her and have gone on to be the basis for many treatments, vaccines and cures but her own family did not know this was taking place until decades later.  The cells were replicated many billions of times over and shared between scientists.  This is the story of those cells and the people Henrietta Lacks left behind, particularly her daughter Deborah.

The author explains the science in an understandable way and tells a compelling story of the humans the science derived from and affected. I actually listened to this book on CD in my car rather than reading it in the paper format.  The two readers are tremendous, making it at once easy to understand and clearly bringing forth the characters so that they are individuals, more in the nature of a radio drama than a book being read.  I would highly recommend it in either format.