1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Texas Escapes Turned Me on to Bitter Persimmons, March 24, 2004
This review is from: Bitter Persimmons: An Unlikely Story (Paperback)
John Trosser, Editor or Texas Escapes, turned me on to A.s. Friedell's excellent memoir about her dramtic, first 32 years of her most interesting life. Trosser wrote about Biiter Persimmons:
In Bitter Persimmons, first time author A.S. Friedell writes a personal story set in recent Texas history that somehow seems so long ago. The story opens on a depot platform in a small central Texas town where infant Alice is held in her grandfather's arms while her father's train pulls out, taking him off to war. He gives tiny Alice a shiny buffalo nickel to keep until he returns.
Her description of an idyllic, albeit brief, childhood in rural cotton-producing Texas provides some of the most memorable scenes in the book. A very literal child, young Alice learns to mimic the words to the romantic post-war songs incessantly played on the radio. The mysterious, half-understood lyrics create unrealistic expectations of love and relationships.
The loneliness of Lee County has (barely) teenage Alice imagining Elvis Presley driving into her front yard to ask for directions - and why not? Everyone else seems to do it. Her singing ability gets noticed and she starts winning local contests, ascending into regional stardom as Texas' possible answer to Brenda Lee. A disastrous audition at Houston's Shamrock Hotel and a move to Austin in the early '60s opens up a world that she never imagined from her hometown of Dime Box.
Broken into three parts: The Girl, The Woman and The Mother, Bitter Persimmons is a story of expectations, disappointments, mistakes and growth. Alice marries five times with her fifth wedding celebrated just a week after her 32nd birthday.
To say that her husbands were "assorted" would be accurate. One was the boy next door, one was Black, one was blind, and one just happened to forget to mention that he was already married.
The backdrop is as wide as Texas - from Austin to Fort Worth to El Paso and even a slight spill over the border into Juarez, Mexico. Cameo appearances are provided by the smaller towns of Giddings, Rockport and Coleman.
Sensationalism and hyperbole are refreshingly absent, so readers looking for a lurid contemporary "thriller" won't find it here. Bitter Persimmons is for readers who find truth stranger than fiction and real life more fascinating than fantasy. These are the ones who'll be swept up and carried away in Friedell's life story.
The author's open, honest style pulls the reader in from the first page. Her characters are real as are the problems confronted, the conflicts resolved and the challenges accepted and won.
Happy endings sometimes happen in real life and that's the case here. This is not giving anything away, since the story is the journey down a long, winding and often bumpy road.
I went down the bumpy road of Bitte Persimmons and it gave me hope and inspiration to carry on.
Bob Langfelder
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad Storytelling, completely unsympathetic storyline, June 14, 2004
This review is from: Bitter Persimmons: An Unlikely Story (Paperback)
Bitter Persimmons starts out with Mrs. Friedall standing on a railway platform as a child, waving goodbye to her father as he leaves for WW II. And this seems to be the highlight of her life. Or just a passing note . . . I'm not too sure. And so, problems began to prop up as I read along, wondering where the author/narrator was going with the story. Come to find out, she goes absolutely nowhere. We never really leave her home state of Texas, and we never establish a viable storyline.
To start out, Mrs. Friedall has serious problems with narrative flow. There isn't one for the first 70 pages or so (and occasionally even after that). On almost every page she jumps from time to time and subject to subject with no rhyme or reason. The book reads like a child's recounting of her diary.
There's a rule among novelists, too, that Mrs. Friedall is not applying: show, don't tell. She tells the reader everything rather than showing them. I know how she feels, what the room feels like, what her boyfriends/husbands do and how they react because she told me. I know where she was when John Kennedy was shot because she told me. She didn't show me any of these items, thus making the book read like a recounting of places, times and events. Not engaging reading.
Add to this fact that she never tells us (at least within in the first 60 pages) the names of any of her prime family members, or even her own name, and you can see why I didn't become involved with any of the characters. Ever. We have to guess what the A.S. on the cover of the book stands for (Alice is her first name, I think, but what the S. stands for I still don't know).
And here's the final nail in the proverbial literary coffin for this book: Mrs. Friedall's life just isn't that interesting. I'm sorry to say something that sounds so meanspirited but it's true. I know I would never DREAM of writing about my life and publishing it. I'm not that interesting either. The only thing she seems to want to get across to the reader is how unfair her parents treated her, and how she seeks acceptance from them at every crossroads in her life. Although this is true of most people, we don't want someone else to tell us about it through weak narration and, what seemed to me at least, whining ("My parents never loved me" or "I chose all the wrong paths and husbands because my parents never loved me" or "I had a baby so that my parents would love and accept me"). This got very, very, very, very tiresome after a short while.
I will say that Mrs. Friedall had an excellent line editor (or editors). Her spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax are all perfect. This may sound like a minor point, but it isn't. With some of the poorly edited material that FWOMP Book Review has received in the past, this was refreshing from that standpoint. But only from that standpoint . . . unfortunately.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bitter Author, bitter experience, December 21, 2006
Finished reading the book, "BITTER PERSIMMONS" by A.S. Friedell. She is not a very good writer. I wondered about the title----she is also a bitter person. She blames everything that happened to her on her parents. NONE of it is her fault.
Underneath the title inside the book it says: "AN UNLIKELY STORY" and that it is.
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