Customer Reviews

Carolina Moon (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is one of those books where all the best parts can be found on the book jacket! I was intrigued by the book jacket description of the Swap Shop Show: "If you've got something you're itching to sell, something you mighta never woulda bought no way, then give us a call," but this idea isn't expanded upon in the text. Instead, this seems to be another in a series of recent books where the authors seem to believe a series of quirky characters alone a great novel make. Not so. Readers want characters they can get to know, characters who grow and change throughout the book, not a series of semi-related vignettes about cardboard cutouts of people. I particularly found McCorkle unable to handle the parallel story lines well. Perhaps the plot ties together in the end (I just couldn't get that far, I really tried!), but the impression I got was of jerking back and forth between stories that may have stood better on their own. For examples of successful books employing the parallel-lives technique, see Tom Wolfe's *A Man in Full* or Michelle Huneven's *Round Rock.* I've gathered in reading reviews that McCorkle is being hailed as a great new Southern author; I found no Southern flavor at all in this book. These silly characters could have lived anywhere. I guess I'll stick to Rita Mae Brown when I want a taste of the South.

Carolina Moon was my first venture into work by Jill McCorkle, but it certainly won't be my last. I loved the characters in this book: Quee, Denny, Tom. And it's been a long time since I read a book and laughed outloud, not once but often. There's more to it than just laughs,however. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys great characters, intriguing plotting, and mystery. And if you don't think that having great fun with a book automatically means it can't also be great fiction, then this may be the book for you.

okay, all you people who said you didn't like this book didn't say something about the book. You said something about yourself. In a world of cynical people who expect something bigger out of the story than just pure human emotion do not realize what you're missing. This book is full of beautiful prose that tell you everything about the characters even if a particular chapter is not from their point of view. I had the privelage of seeing her read excerpts from this masterpeice aloud and it was wonderful! She truely is a great storyteller and this book is fabulous!

The award-winning McCorkle's fifth novel delivers the humor, zest, and thoughtfully engaging characters readers have come to expect from this Southern writer ("Tending to Virginia," "Ferris Beach").

In the North Carolina town of Fulton, 15 miles and a world away from the coast, Quee Purdy, 69, a flamboyant and free-spirited widow, has just opened an unconventional quit-smoking clinic where resident addicts are "pampered right out of the addiction."

Quee is at the center of a small circle of younger Fultonites. She holds the key to the mysteries in their lives and explores these secrets aloud in story-telling tours of her gallery of photos - pictures of strangers who have captured her imagination and inspire her to heights of fancy and fact. Her audience, however, seldom gets the point of her veiled parables.

Tom Lowe is a favorite of Quee's. A handsome handyman, Tom's life is stalled in brooding over the suicide of a father he scarcely knew, the underwater lot that was his father's only legacy, and the lover he lost to the wider world outside Fulton.

Denny Parks, sexy, insecure and adventurous, is the daughter of Quee's oldest friend, who has been invited to the clinic as a therapist, a profession in which she has absolutely no experience. She has, however, had a nervous breakdown and loves to talk, eminent qualifications.

Alicia Jameson, another of Quee's assistants, is the abused wife of a loathsome-Lothario local talk show host, Jones Jameson, who has disappeared.

The next circle out includes Sarah McAllister, Tom's high-school sweetheart, who returned to Fulton with her husband in tow and fading hopes of a baby, only to end in a coma from an aneurysm. And Wallace Johnson, the old postmaster, who's been reading letters addressed to the Wayward One, a suicide, for 20 years. And Myra Carter, an elderly admirer of Jones Jameson, who hates Quee for suspected adultery with her husband, the late doctor.

The lives of all these people are intertwined with Quee's in ways only Quee is cognizant of, a Godlike omniscience that is a driving force in her own life. But one of the book's chief ironies is that the reader comes into possession of a puzzle piece illuminating a misunderstanding that has haunted, romanticized, even directed Quee's life.

McCorkle, also an accomplished short story writer, reveals her characters' lives in vignettes that rove among various points of view, exploring interlocking histories that share a peripheral fascination with the missing Jones Jameson and an unknown but crucial connection with Quee.

The author forges an intimacy with her readers through lives full of vivid details, memories and actions that make her characters' anxieties, fears and ambitions visceral. While her story includes romance, adultery, even murder, these are only colorful elements in the greater tapestry of the human heart. Her concluding chapter, with its quietly explosive revelations, sends the reader reeling while barely causing a ripple in the lives of her still-unknowing characters.

"Carolina Moon" is a novel of intricate beauty, fueled by Southern humor, charm, tragedy and guile.

Not sure how this one ended up on my gotta-read-it list. I only made it halfway through before realizing I was avoiding picking up where I left off in this book. While the author did create some interesting characters, oftentimes their actions or thoughts or dialogue were implausible and hard to swallow that someone would actually do or think or say such a thing. Also, there were many times I had to re-read a paragraph again to to glean "WHO said this?" or "WHAT is s/he talking about?" From an English perspective, misplaced modifiers and shifting POV made for choppy reading experience. Glimpses of a good author here, though sometimes waaay off the mark. The characters themselves, the story (what there is of it), and the writing were all too off-putting for me to finish this book.

Jill McCorkle seems to be trying too hard to be unique and quirky just for the sake of being "original." I was attracted to this book because I like fiction written from the point of view of many characters, but "Carolina Moon" was an amalgam of too many different styles that just wouldn't blend. We have letters, we have third person narration, and we have first person narration in the form of an annoying young woman talking to a tape recorder diary. Too much.

This last narration bothered me because the woman didn't sound like she was talking to a tape recorder - the voice sounds more like a written voice. For example, she barely distinguishes who's speaking, which is fine on the page where you can see indents and paragraphs and quotation marks, but as a spoken voice it didn't work. She didn't sound like a real person. The point of having someone tell his or her story through a tape recorder diary is to capture his/her voice more naturally. McCorkle just tells the story this way because it's "neat." The character doesn't sound any different from any of the other characters - and her story is pointless and contributes nothing to the plot or sublot or second subplot.

Quee was just plain annoying. She's an old, quirky prostitute medicine woman who collects pictures of people she doesn't know and makes stories up about them. She was quirky and had a quirky perspective on morals, so we're supposed to like her. I hated her. I'm tired of fiction about crazy, quirky people trying to force their agendas down our throats. The best novel I've read about a quirky person was "A Separate Peace" because the narrator in that novel gets just as annoyed at the quirky character as the reader. (And he pushes him out of a tree.) Read that book instead.

I think McCorkle may just have been suffering from some quirkiness herself when she wrote this book. The characters are flat and uninteresting, and the stories are bland. There's no reason for the unnamed woman to drop letters to her dead lover in the mailbox except to advance the story. And the only purpose the mailman has is to read the letters to us. The characters are more like the author's pawns than real people. The book didn't really seem to be about anything, and the ending was unbelievable (in a bad way, not a good way). I was surprised because McCorkle is usually a very good character writer. Her short story "Intervention" is a marvelous story about a woman torn between her alcoholic husband and her children, who wish to have an intervention. Great character in that story. I'd recommend reading McCorkle's short stories instead of "Carolina Moon."

Reminiscent of the Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin this book jumps from character to character, allowing the story to build slowly. From letters written by a jilted lover to her ex who committed suicide, to the tape recorded ramblings of a semi-disturbed psychologist, we learn about the murder of a loud mouthed radio talk show host. The matriarch of the book is a woman who runs a Stop Smoking clinic which utilizes less than conventional tactics to break their client`s addictions.

I expected this book with the tacky cover to be quite cheesy. I was pleasantly surprised that I was wrong.

Since this was McCorkle's fifth (long-awaited) novel, I was anticipating it greatly. But I found the plot too much like Lee Smith's FAMILY LINEN. Surely after five or six novels an author gets better, right? There's more to fiction than characters talking non-stop. There's got to be more than slapstick comedy. Like many North Carolina authors, Jill is the darling. Can't do any wrong. But readers will be the final judge.

And she is NOT the "new" Eudora Welty. If anyone in the south deserves that title, it's Lee Smith, the grand dame of literature.

I love Myrtle Beach and all of the South and was very excited to read a Southern author. What a huge disappointment! I'm curious how this is a National Bestseller as advertised.