Customer Reviews

Charms for the Easy Life

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book has more substance to it than some of the readers have recognized. If midwives and stories about medicine in the early to mid 1900's interest you, try this story. Or, if exploring mother-daughter relationships that are positive and make you feel good, try this story. If you love learning how people who love each other interact and take care of each other, read this. If you have ever longed for someone that could have the insight to tell you what is best for you and have a riotous sense of humor, read this. If you enjoy a read that takes a difficult time (WWII) and weaves it through the lives of some incredible women, try this story. You can make it very complex, if you must, or simply take the story as it is, and as it was meant to be. You will find yourself thinking back to these characters often, and wishing for that charming life that made living with each other easy. When you have that, you just may have what it takes for an "easy" life. This book can help in the meantime.

I have seen negative reviews of this book, but I loved it. My teenage daughter's margin notes made it even more special.

While the story may be unrealistic, it is fiction, and why do we read fiction? I read it for escape, and this book "escapes you" to a place where women are strong, where your grandma can tell you everything you need to know, where there are some bad, lost, and abandoning men, but not all men are bad, where life is full of hope and magic is possible.

It is literate, with references to many authors we should all read. There is some social commentary, some sadness, some things everyone should know (papaya tablets for digestion, aloe for burns, etc.)

Charms for the Easy Life ("depending on your definition of easy" should have been a subtitle) was wonderful. I will be reading more of Kaye Gibbons books in the future.

A lovely novel.

Kaye Gibbons has one of those rare gifts that not all writers possess: the ability to take the lives of fictional people who are seemingly nothing in a high profile society and make them sparkle with with more interest and more reality-based magic than any heavily financed publicity machine could ever do.

You come to believe these three beautiful, strong women and the reasons for why they stand together--not because--but in spite of the unworthy men they've encountered. Grandma Charlie Kate, a smart, literature loving, though uneducated woman, is gifted in natural healings and believes that when a person dies and purges (foam at the mouth), it is all their hopes, dreams, and things left unsaid. She is odd by others' standards, outspoken, and that's what makes people respect her!

Daughter Sophia is the more openly dreamy side of Charlie Kate, hopelessly romantic in spite of a disappointing marriage to a man in yellow shoes, and she loves high fashion. She faints easily at the sight of infections when she helps her mother on housecalls, and is mad for a man named Mr. Baines who takes his sweet time going to the altar.

Sophia's daughter Margaret tells the entire story of the family's somewhat Hemingway-like suicidal history and recounts their lives mainly around WWII. Margaret is more like Charlie Kate, but she still has enough of her mother in her to fall in love with a wounded soldier who comes from a good home, having broken the circle of bad men on the first crack.

Everyone makes such a big deal about the Vietnam soldiers suffering more than any others, and I know that they did their share, but if you read this book and the life breathed into it, you will see that no war and what it does are any good. Beautifully written, easy to accept as nonfiction, and full of bittersweet richness, this is easily a book that should reap rewards for its quiet grace, humility, and strength of character. I love this book dearly, and urge you to read it because of the human interest. You will never forget it long after you are finished.

Contrary to some of the reviews I have read for this book, I found it believable and enjoyable. Just because you come from a rural background does not mean you cannot develop an appreciation for fine literature or are unable to rise above your origins to make a better life for yourself -- college education notwithstanding. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Charlie Kate was an inspiration and reminded me of similar older people who I grew up with here in the much-disparaged rural state of South Dakota. Most of the people living in the 1930s had no other resources besides themselves. They had to rely on their own ingenuity and that of their neighbors, to pull them through. I think that was very well-illustrated in Gibbons' narrative. The main reason I enjoy Gibbons' books is because in spite of all the trauma her characters go through, they rely on humor to deal with it. That is one of the most valuable lessons that can be learned whether you live in urban America or not.

I cannot get enough of Kaye Gibbons! I thought this book was a sweet story and although I read it some time ago, the relationship of the grandmother and granddaughter has remained a lasting memory. I recommend the book as an enjoyable read. If you are looking for something intellectual and deep this is not the book for you. It is a story, entertaining, and reminiscent.

I read the reviews of this book because I wanted to see what other Amazon-ians thought of one my all-time favorites. I now want to jump up and down on my monitor after the Kirkus review. Boo. Hiss. The review criticizes the book mostly for it's Southern storytelling influence and values, and as someone who read it while temporarily living in the deep South, I have to say that those elements made it all the more special. As a "Transplanted Yankee" I not only learned about the South from this book but it make me appreciate the sense of family that is so abundant there. This book moves through generations of women gifted with honorable traits and as a reader I related to a bit of each of them. That, to me, is the mark of an excellent story. _Charms for the Easy Life_ is one of the best books you will ever read. I promise. When Oprah selected Gibbons books as her book club selections, I was ticked, but disappointed that this wasn't one of them. This book will lighten your day and paste a grin on your face that will last for days. I highly recommend it...especially for the wintery dark days coming up. This will light a candle in your soul that will warm you for years on end.

Kaye Gibbons' "Charms for the Easy Life" tracks three generations of tough-minded women from the beginning of the twentieth century up to World War Two. Charlie Kate is the larger-than-life character, an "Ubermensch." Charlie delivers babies, heals with herbs, reads two books a week, and directs the lives of her daughter, Sophia, and Margaret (Charlie's granddaughter). Since the impressionable Margaret is the narrator, it stands to reason hero worship takes precedence over a more reliable picture of the family's history of the first half of the twentieth century. She recites events before her birth with a fondness that is reserved for those we do not truly know; some warts of the family tree are exposed, such as the history of several suicides that provide some morbid humor. One male family member whose sexual orientation is questioned by everyone except his mother, "shot himself after having spent two miserable years grieving over the death of Rudolph Valentino." Women's clothes are found in one of his drawers. The son's mother says, "Oh, Charlie Kate. He had a girlfriend. Look at all her things here. I always knew what people said about him wasn't so." Margaret recalls, "my grandmother stuffed the dreamland girlfriend's things into a paper sack and marveled that a man would cram his feet into shoes so high and narrow."

The meat of the novel centers on Charlie and her indomitable spirit (she surely would be labeled a feminist today). One conflict both Charlie and Sophia have endured, that Margaret is determined to avoid, is the deserting husband. As far as dating advice, Charlie would often say, "Kiss all you want. Kissing's fine, nothing more than uptown shopping on downtown business. But if you suffer him to put that ugly thing in you before you're married, do not come to me to ask how to undo what you have so stupidly done." Somehow the three of them live under one roof in Raleigh, North Carolina, and quite well financially, since Charlie's mobile medical business (no license) is booming. Margaret recalls several stories of how grandmother saved this person from a lynching; sewed body parts together, treated malaria, and comforted the dying. After awhile one half-expects to read Charlie donning a cape and running around in tights with a big "S" on her chest (Charlie would have to wait at least until 1938 when Superman was created).

Besides the over-the-top portrait of Charlie, the novel still seems to plow forward as Gibbons fleshes out characters with dialogue that is sharp and has no effects of sounding contrived in order to say something witty. "Charms for Easy Life" may not offer a rounded character description of Sophia, Margaret, or a realistic one of Charlie, but the novel still manages to enliven a picture of life down South from the turn of the century to World War Two. Life may have not been easy for these renaissance women, but Gibbons sure has afforded us the pleasure to partake in their charms.

Bohdan Kot

Three generations of women are the focal point of this novel, and though their familial bonds are tight, there are unique characteristics of each that make the reader care for each. Charlie Kate, a headstrong "medicine woman", says it like it is and won't take no for an answer. But she is not just forthright with her opinions, but also with her feelings for her family. Her daughter Sophia tends to "need" to be someone's companion, whether it be a man, her mother, or her own daughter. Margaret, my favorite character, was raised by the women and gets to experience things in her life that truly define her. I loved how close the three were, and that their traits complemented one another.

A book that you hope goes on and on. I read it in two evenings.

This is the fascinating story of three generations, with a midwife/herbalist grandmother, her single mother daughter, and her bookworm granddaughter. The grandmother, Charlie Kate, is a fascinating, well developed character whom the reader cannot help but admire (she reminded me strongly of the aunts from Alice Hoffman's 'Practical Magic'). Somewhere between a medicine woman and a psychic, she was nevertheless predictable, in that she hung around until her daughter and granddaughter's lifes were fixed and then she died. Terribly predictable, but sparkling with its descriptions of WWII Raleigh and the life of an herbalist/midwife. The book leaves you wishing for a grandmother like Charlie Kate and a suitor like Tom Hawkings III. Good easy read- would make an especially good winter read, curled up in an armchair in front of a fire, covered by a cozy throw, sipping a mug of homemade cocoa.

The three women in this book are possibly the strongest characters I have ever read about. The story is told in lovely prose, reading this book is like sharing a weekend with your best women friends. I wish this exquisitely told tale was one without an end.