Customer Reviews

Bastard Out of Carolina

5 star:		(112)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Yowtch! This searing quasi-autobiography dressed up as fiction is worth every painful moment it takes to get through it. The book's title says a lot: it's the story of the childhood of a "white trash bastard" and her battles against physical and sexual abuse. I wonder: was this the first book that inaugurated the era of so many memoirs about childhood abuse that Oprah eventually elevated to mythic levels?
Bastard out of Carolina is a scarey story with memorable characters who will haunt readers nearly as thoroughly as they haunted Bone, the child protagonist: the violent ones, the jealous ones, the just plain weird ones, the inexplicable ones...
This is not a book with a happy ending. One gets the sense that the end of the story hasn't been written - possibly because the author hasn't lived it yet.
Outstanding. Worth 6 stars.

I read this book as part of a college literature assignment. Bastard Out of Carolina is a well-written, deeply moving, and unforgettable novel about a young southern girl's struggle with physical and sexual abuse, along with the stigma of being labeled "white trash" and "illegitimate." Ms. Allison's characters are vibrant and alive, especially the young girl, Bone, who poignantly tells the tale of her tormented youth. For all its literary worth, this is not a book that I would have read on my own. The story is deeply disturbing, not only in its content but in the underlying hopelessness of tone. One feels an overwhelming instinct to cradle Bone in one's arms to protect her from her frustrated, jealous, and emotionally disturbed stepfather and from her mother's senseless abandonment. Bone's reactions of burning anger, festering hatred, and perverted fantasies, along with her resultant self image, compound the hopelessness of her young life. Salvation and vindication can only be acquired through her love of gospel music...and although she's told repeatedly that she can't sing, her heart yearns and pleads to God for the gift of song. But the gift of salvation through Jesus that God freely offers is never accepted, and only Bone knows why. Instead of salvation, Bone finds a haven in the home of her lesbian aunt, Raylene. While Raylene is a compassionate, strong, and loving woman, the reader is left with the impression at the conclusion of the story that Bone struggles with her experiences for the rest of her life. Perhaps the quote by James Baldwin at the beginning of the book says it best: "People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead." In the end, no matter what injustices we face in this life, we all will have to answer for how we choose to live our lives. We can choose to be defeated, or we can choose to overcome. Bone's true vindication remains irretrievably in her hands.

Having grown up in the south myself I saw the stigmas portrayed in Allison's book to be true. It is hard to express to people who were not in this environment what it was like, but Allison has done this in her book. Basterd out of Carolina is an excellent book in that it tells the story of "Bone" Boatwright, and her life as poor white trash in the south. Bone's speech patterns in telling the story are so clear and easy to read that it adds to the books authenticity and to it's believability. She tells about her mother's struggle to remove the illigitimate label from her birth cirtificate, and how this affected her life. Bone had to fight to prove herself to the world around her. She didn't want to be the bastard people called her, she didn't want to have people control her through their labels. Included in this struggle is the story of overcoming the abuse she receives from "Daddy Glen" her step father. He beats her and molests her, under the guise that she asked for it. It is only through the help of her uncles and her aunts that she is able to rise above the abuse, and the abandonment from her mother and become the person she wants to be. The book is partly autobiographical on the part of Allison, and she has used her own experiences to tell a powerful story of strength. I reccomend this book to people who enjoyed books by Fannie Flagg, and anyone who has had to deal with abuse and/or abandonment

First off, I am from Greenville County, SC. I no longer live there, but I can say that Allison captured the setting perfectly. She described places I've seen, the kinds of people I've seen. But every county (north and south of the Mason-Dixon line) has its "white trash," though it seems to be a Southern stereotype.

The language of this book is incredible. I've noticed in some of the reviews, the readers suggested more editing. This is told from the eyes of a young rural girl. She does not have the vocabulary of an English professor. I love that people who have only had reviews for Amazon published can actually commment on the writing ability of someone with the talent of Allison. Another reviewer said the book was depressing. If she needed a "feel-good" story, she should stick with the CHICK-LIT shelves. Life isn't always fun or humorous or happy in the end.

This is an awesome book. I love to read and at this point, I have read so much - I am a hard to please reader. The prose is simple, yet it will grab and hold your attention. In fact, before I comment on the story, let me say that if you are an aspiring writer - this is a good book to read just to see what simple, yet very engaging prose looks like. I don't care what kind of writer you are, if you have to communicate anything to anyone in "words," you will benefit from reading this.

The story is told from the perspective of a child, but as an adult (and this is definitely adult reading), you won't be able to put it down. There are summaries that I won't rehash, but let me say this - one thing I can't shake is that throughout the book, I wanted to occasionally question Bone's mother about her choices. I found myself wishing that she had made different decisions - especially the decisions that hurt her children and caused her embarrassment. There are also a few racial references in here that some will find disturbing - but it was a reality of the time period in which this book is set. If you are looking for a book to make you smile or laugh, this is not it. But one motif that I did find encouraging was that of family. Throughout, Bone's extended family is a strong one - despite the hardships they face and the disagreements they have. Unfortunately, the love of her family couldn't protect her from everything.

Although this is about a poor, white, southern family, there's something in the story that brings to mind one of my favorite books,"The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison. I mention that to say, if you like Toni Morrison, I think you'll enjoy this book. Toni Morrison's prose is quite a bit more complex, but the sad feeling you get when reading about Toni Morrison's characters is similar to the feeling I get when reading about Bone and her family. Bastard Out of Carolina also shares similar themes with "The Bluest Eye" - sexual abuse, the feeling of living life as one of the seemingly "undesirables" (white trash, black, etc.), tragedy, family and no happy endings.

Greenville County, South Carolina is a quiet southern town, home to black walnut trees with "knotty roots [that rise] out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Greenville County is also home to Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed Bone shortly after birth, a character with just as many scars as those walnut trees. In Bone, Dorothy Allison has created a character that is all at once strong and weak, heartbreaking and joyful, needy and independent, and overall a survivor. In Bone, she has created a character that is not soon forgotten in the mind or in the heart, and written a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale that just may break the reader's heart.
Our journey with Bone in 1950's South Carolina introduces us to not only Bone but to the whole Boatwright family. Her mother Anney, only 15 years old when she gives birth, Anney's three brothers and two sisters, and Anney's parents, about which her brother Earle said "our mama's a rattlesnake and our daddy was a son of a gun." The stifling hot summers are spent on family porches where Bone would breathe in her Granny's scent "like the steam off soup," drink sweet tea, listen to stories and watch the dust stirred up by kids and dogs running wild just like the adults they have to look up to. Dorothy Allison brings to life a family scarred by poverty in which the women picked up endlessly after the men and seemed to begin aging immediately after birth, and the men never seemed to age despite their cracked teeth, stints in jail and hard drinking.
Bone enters this story labeled a bastard, "certified [so] by the state of South Carolina," her illegitimate status permanently stamped in red at the bottom of her birth certificate. This is something her mother tirelessly tries to have removed and bothers her to no end, hating the negative connotation of "trash" that goes with it. Bone's life gets no easier after her mother remarries at age 21. Bone finds herself with a new father, and then in the position of first fending off and then succumbing to incestuous advances and beatings from her new `Daddy Glen', who has "the kind of love [for Anney that] eats a man up." Thus begins Bone's struggle against Daddy Glen to keep her mother's love and attention, despite his best efforts to beat her self-worth into oblivion and have Anney all to himself. The depiction of these hardships is something that Allison peppers with the grit and reality of her own hard scrabble life, herself being an incest survivor, an illegitimate child, and being born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina.
Bone stumbles through life with the idea that "this body, like my aunts' bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away,"and Bone's experiences with Daddy Glen only reinforce this idea of worthlessness. These aunts that she looks up to end up being her saving grace as Bone is sent to stay with one aunt, and then another, finding refuge and strength in the knowledge and life experience that each one shares with her. Despite her anger, her hunger to be loved and appreciated is so painfully evident that it breaks your heart to hear her Daddy Glen tell her "that woman [Anney] loves you more than I can understand." That this character lives through the final beating and rape and escapes from someone so intent on destroying her, then loses her mother, her home, and at 12 years old accepts that she is "already who I was going to be," is a testament to the strength and resilience of human beings and the power of family to help us make it out alive.

Dorothy Allison is the real deal. I've read a fair bit of her stuff, and while "Cavedweller" and "Two or Three Things I Know For Sure" pale in comparison to the achievement of this novel, I doubt she has ever written a dishonest sentence in her life. From the first page, you believe her, and you trust her. "Bastard" is certainly harrowing, but it's also uplifting without ever being sentimental or mawkish. Allison's characters are often poor, abused, marginalized, and have been stripped of their dignity in some way, but most of her work is fired with a certain gritty optimism and quiet determination within these (often female) characters to reclaim this lost dignity and sense of self. Bone is no exception to this rule, and she's a character so alive and so human she immediately invites you to pour all your sense of identification and empathy into her in a way that the best characters do. The end of this book is absolutely wrenching, and Allison steers clear of pat answers and happy-ever-afters. She exposes the bleakness of childhood, and the powerlessness of children at the hands of often less-than-capable (and sometimes downright corrupt) adults. More than anything, though, I like Dorothy Allison because she makes you believe compassion, intelligence, and storytelling are all parts of the same beast.

In many ways, Bone's experience with child abuse represents the prototypical case. She is abused by an older male relative (here, her stepfather). Although there are multiple children in the family, she is her abuser's only victim. The abuser was abused himself as a child and suffers from self loathing. The mother turns a blind eye to the abuse and also suffers from self-hatred.

Yet this book is so richly narrated and characterized that it is anything but typical or standard. The description of the Carolina communities the Boatrights inhabit, the diner at which Anney works, the multiple shacks that the family lives in are so tightly drawn that the reader feels that she inhabits them. The characters are complex and diverse, especially that of Bone and Anney. The ending, while heartbreaking, is also probably realistic, and much better than one possible alternative: Bone returns to Anney and Glen for more abuse. That scenario is much more likely than yet another possible scenario: Anney, Bone and Reese create their own home and Glen simply exits the picture.

Many of these reviews judge Anney harshly, and in many ways rightfully so. However, I found her character to be both pathetic and sympathetic. Here is a woman without education, skills, or money, who has grown up in a culture of tolerating men's bad behavior. True, she should have removed her daughter from such a dreadful situation, but in many ways she lacked the resources to do so. Her only asset was a tight-knit family that failed to teach her that life without Glen was a real possibility.

This novel is dreary, tragic, and will make your stomach turn. Yet I found myself enjoying it just the same. This is both an indictment of child abuse and a sympathetic portrayal of the lives of the poor and uneducated throughout America, especially women.

I selected this book as an optional assignment recently while working on a master's degree in Southern culture. I have no regrets about my choice. Allison sucks the reader in through the eyes of Bone, a child that is the town joke as a babe due to the horrid red stamp proclaiming "bastard" on her birth certificate. Bone searches for identity and love through her family, the notorious Boatwrights, known for drinking, womanizing, and shooting, sometimes all at once. Bone also becomes the victim of a stepfather's lust and jealousy. Tragic moments and violent abuse grasp the reader by the collar and won't let go. Allison's prose is a pool of the unfortunate, exposing and in some instances celebrating the unspoken class, white trash. Do not deny yourself the pleasure of Bone, Alma, Raylene, Anney, and all the rest of the Boatright clan. They will make you laugh, tremble, cry and want to drink white lightning while listening to Patsy Cline records.

Yowtch! This searing quasi-autobiography dressed up as fiction is worth every painful moment it takes to get through it. The book's title says a lot: it's the story of the childhood of a "white trash bastard" and her battles against physical and sexual abuse. I wonder: was this the first book that inaugurated the era of so many memoirs about childhood abuse that Oprah eventually elevated to mythic levels?
Bastard out of Carolina is a scarey story with memorable characters who will haunt readers nearly as thoroughly as they haunted Bone, the child protagonist: the violent ones, the jealous ones, the just plain weird ones, the inexplicable ones...
This is not a book with a happy ending. One gets the sense that the end of the story hasn't been written - possibly because the author hasn't lived it yet.
Outstanding. Worth 6 stars.