12 years old Frankie, bored with the life she leads in her dusty little town, puts all her hopes for change on the upcoming wedding of her brother. A coming of age story that captures delicately and in beautifully crafted style the confusion of early adolescence. Berenice, the black cook, is a fabulous secondary character, and the moments Frankie, Berenice and Frankie's little cousin spend in the kitchen, talking, are probably the most beautiful of the book.

This book is going to MmeClinton as a RABCK, maybe the first of the year...
Happy New Year and happy reading!

Finally made it home from a trip to Kansas to find this lovely book waiting for me in the pile of mail!! It looks lovely, and I am eager to read it soon! Merci, aussi, du joli petit mot!!

on the benches outside the entrances on the porch

I recently received The Member of the Wedding as a wishlist freebie (check out Bookcrossing.com) and decided to not add it to the TBR pile but just read it right away. Carson McCullers is a marvelous writer. Not a stray word, just a sustained feel of the agony of being 13 years old and seemingly stuck forever in a small Alabama town... although the feelings and stream-of-consciousness of Frankie (who renames herself F. Jasmine when her world seems to open up for her) should be recognizable to anyone whose life was similar at that age. Frankie's mother died during her childbirth, father is a jeweler "downtown" who has recently insisted on more separation from his daughter, the family is taken care of largely by black Berenice (a situation familiar to most of us who grew up in the South), a smart reliable sassy rational dreamer, and John Henry, a 6 year-old cousin wise beyond his years even though still very much the child who helps round out the home story. And Frankie's older brother, in the service during WWII, is soon to be married, and the wedding is the springboard to all F. Jasmine's longings and dreams of getting away from the life and the town where she feels trapped. Frankie does not feel she is a member of anything at all, and she lives with an impossible-to-define loneliness and sense of being separate from the world she so wants to be important in, full of anxious fears of a life of nothingness. "To think about the world for very long made her afraid. She was not afraid of Germans or bombs or Japanese. She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself." If Frankie's inner voice so beautifully captures the pubescent awakening, it is Berenice's that breaks my heart. "We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself." And she, of course, is caught worse than they because "the done drawn completely extra bounds around all colored people." This is a true gem of a book whose prose transfixed me for hours on end.