Here's the cliff's note version:
Fulton presents her characters in chronological order in keeping with the given era.
- Mamie sees the emerging century as magic
- Peg is stuck in old ideas of right-relations for an aging woman...not in step with the move towards liberation/votes for women
- Charlotte generates sweets to please her man but diets to be Flapper thin, encounters Ray's Orientalist mother
BLOGGER, WE are sooooo frustrated that you keep loosing our very important and time consuming work!!!
ReplyDeleteOK. Now that I got that off my chest...
I was having a hard time getting onto the reading at first and I was not sure why. After speaking with Zu at the induction ceremony I think it is because we have just come from two extremely dynamic stories that sweep you up instantly and hold you suspended over the text for the following hundred something pages. This story of stories is more nuanced than Woman and Season. IT has to tell us the lives and details of people we are suppose to understand and care about. It takes time to unwrap each individual so that we the reader may take them into our minds and hearts.
I found Mamie tough as nails and doing the best she can for a tumultuous time for being a woman. It sounds as if she is on the edge of death with consumption (TB) but in "Shadow Table" Charlotte, her daughter, talks of her mother as still being alive. That is a woman with stamina and stock.
Peg Flynn and her"Queen Winetrgreen" story I adored. It took a few pages to get the accent right but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed reading it out loud to myself. I felt that the story was human, emotional, sweet, funny, and honest. I wrote lol in many a paragraph. She is a tough old bird with many interesting psalms to read and ponder. You have to love a woman that can call herself out as she does, "How wearisome it must be to live with an old woman who brought livestock in the building" (45). Was she really thinking the seagull was going to clean the chimney for her? How did she wrangle that old gull into a bag by herself? How come no one noticed she had a seagull in her bag when she came home? Just too funny. It is reminiscent of a Faulty Towers episode or some other British comedy from a few decades hence.
Dear Charlotte. It is sad that she has such troubling self esteem and body image and has found someone with just the same problems but in a mirror image. She is sweet and naive. I appreciate that she appreciates her mother as much as she does. I also enjoyed that Charlotte felt her mother had catchy sayings like, "Don't come home if you get killed" (55). We also get an inkling into what has been going on with Mamie since her story with Charlotte's recounting the tale of toddler Joseph dying of a respiratory infection. He was the quiet one clinging to Mamie's skirt at the Lily of the Mohawks gathering.
I am enjoying the timeline. I like the way that each story is told from the females p.o.v. I think that Fulton's attention to detail of the era is on point and gives you the sense of being there. I image everything in a sepia tone with much tobacco smoke and dust lingering in the air.
So far the book is indeed a slower pace compared to the others, but not in a negative way. I find the writing in the book to be rather charming, and I'm trying to fathom how the author could so convincingly have us fall into each section of time. Just the mannerisms, the phrases, the relics, they all gives us a great feeling of the period of time they each live in. The characters have more depth in this book than the others in some ways. I feel like we see deeper into the personality of these characters, as compared to the plainer but poetic narration of past books. It is slower to read (with a large bias of finals contributing to that), but I'm finding it more enjoyable.
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