Customer Reviews

Crazy in Alabama

5 star:		(85)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Your homework for tonight: Drop everything and read Crazy in Alabama! This is such a great book -- much better than the movie. Mark Childress's carefully drawn characters come alive in these pages. Aunt Lucille will amaze you will all the nutty things she does. And Peejoe's story will have your heart breaking.

It all starts when Aunt Lucille and her six children come ambling up the driveway of her mother's house early May 1965. She's killed her bullying husband and stashed his head in a Tupperware bowl (with a Press-and-Lock seal that really works!), and now with him out of the way, she's free to pursue her dream: to become an actress. Leaving her children with her mother, Lucille has zoomed off to Hollywood, evoking suspicion and evading arrest at every turn.

Twisted into this story is another tale told through the eyes of 12-year-old Peejoe. He and his brother, Wiley, spend the summer in Industry, Alabama with Lucille's brother, Uncle Dove. As the county coroner and local funeral director, Dove has quite a busy summer ahead of him -- when Industry opens up their new "whites only" municipal swimming pool and the entire town takes a tragic turn.

Crazy in Alabama is both riotous and rollicking as well as a sad reminder of the Civil Rights Movement and its history. Lucille's adventures will have readers laughing out loud as suppressed feelings awaken in her on her journey across the country. And the view through the innocent eyes of Peejoe will have readers wondering why all life's answers can't be so simple. An action-packed novel and one that won't be forgotten! Has all the qualities of a quirky southern tale that will amuse you and move you.

'Crazy in Alabama' is one of those unique novels that comes along every once in awhile, and just makes you grin and shake your head in amusement. The book focuses around 2 characters, Peejoe, and his unique aunt Lucille. Lucille, frustrated with the boring life she's leading, decides to run off to Hollywood to become a movie star, and there's only one thing stopping her: her abusive husband Chester. So she puts rat poison in his coffee, and decides to take his head along as a keepsake. Meanwhile, Peejoe, usurped from his grandma's house by Lucille's brats, is in the middle of a race war with his brother and Uncle Dove, all the while worrying about Lucille and what will happen if she's caught. 'Crazy in Alabama' is one-of-a-kind, showing us the ugly side of the South, and just how far people will really go to get what they want.

A reviewer cited on the back cover of this novel calls it "a combination of Thelma and Louise and To Kill a Mockingbird, and that's about right. Beginning in 1965 in the tiny town of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, a single explosive event scatters the characters and sends the story in two directions at once. Twelve-year-old Peejoe (short for Peter Joseph) and his brother are sent to live with their Uncle Dove, a mortician in nearby Industry, while their Aunt Lucille takes off for Hollywood, chasing her dream of landing a starring role on "The Beverly Hillbillies". While Peejoe witnesses both sides of the civil rights movement, right in his own backyard, Lucille seeks the freedom she never had as a frustrated housewife. As the two stories alternately diverge and intertwine, often hilariously, Childress still manages to present an important social commentary.

Mark has a talent for writing prose that is simultaneoulsy thought-provoking and hysterically funny; his world is both authentic and bizzare. He is a master at capturing the experience of youth -- the combination of innocence and growing awareness that we all experienced in some form or another, and his narrative voice is so strong that you'll easily go along for the ride, forgetting you're laughing because one of the women carries around her husband's head in tupperware, or that the people you care about so much are only fabricated characters in a book. This is a highly enjoyable novel that weaves together the story of a woman chasing her dream of stardom with the story of a young boy growing up in the South during the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Besides being a great read, it raises thought provoking questions about how we have treated and continue to treat each other.

Part a coming of age story and part awakening--both of a woman who has been kept down by her husband and of the African American community of 1960s Alabama, Crazy in Alabama is one heck of a read.

The story's main characters are Peejoe (Peter Joseph), a 12 year old orphan who was living with his beloved grandmother (Meemaw) until his crazy aunt cut off her husband's head and deserted her children. The aunt, Lucille, is the other main character. At 33, she has six children, a dead husband and a burning desire to make it in Hollywood, which is where she heads after she has committed the grisly murder.

Childress takes on big issues (race relations, oppression of women, the media, mental illness) and displays them unflinchingly. He also shows how there are some folks--leaders (Lucille also becomes some sort of de facto leader of women's issues)--who take advantage of serious situations for their own political gain.

Childress proves himself great in this book. He writes with such deft assuredness that he makes it look easy, but it's not. Clearly a student of popular culture, he weaves details (songs, movies, television) into a fine cloth and makes us feel as though we are right there with him.

Part Southern Gothic, part Hollywood exposé, part political treatise, this book will endure. But above and beyond all that, it's a great read.

For once, an author has taken me to places I've never been and has set me up to turn me upside down in the closing pages. There is NOTHING in this story that can be clearly anticipated. Justice does a crazy (and hilarious) turnabout; racism in people in high places is not carefully put away in a neat package to satisfy the transparent do-gooders in our midst. For all his awesome way with humor, Childress takes his reader on a sustained rollercoaster ride into the depths of the integration conundrum which is still very much alive in this country and the heights to which the smallest of us can go.

...but there's a solid message buried not too deeply in this book. In part it's another southern coming-of-age tale, but it's somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Terrific story telling and utterly outrageous scenes. The thought that even a little bit of this is probably based on something that really happened is too delicious to contemplate.
Read it and laugh - and then think about it a little more seriously.

This story is so intriguing because of the main two plots being told simulaneously. Peejoe is such a memorable character...reminds me a lot of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. His involvement with the racial issues teach him so much while he's growing up. He's the type of child who doesn't see color. On the other hand, Aunt Lucille is one crazy--but hilarious--broad! Her wild excursions are very entertaining, while shocking at the same time. It's neat how these two characters are going through two completely different things, yet they are both "growing up" and learning pretty much the same lesson about standing up for who you are, not letting anyone put you down, being an individual, etc. Overall, this was a great read...I'd recommend it to anyone.

The University of Alabama is known for having a winning tradition on the gridiron, but Alabama graduate Mark Childress is establishing a winning tradition of a different sort. His highly successful fiction book Crazy In Alabama is the funiest book I've ever read. Set in 1965, the reader is taken on a hillarious journey across country from Alabama to Hollywood
with Lucille, the wacko aunt of 12-year old Peejoe, the story's narrator, as she heads to audition for a part on the Beverly Hillbillies. Along for the ride in the back seat of a stolen Cadiallac, Lucille has the head of her husband Chester stored in a Tupperware lettuce crisper. Lucille gives Chester rat poison mixed in a cup of coffee, then decapitates him with the Sunbeam craving knife, because Chester refuses to let her go to Hollywood for the audition. It's Lucille's life long dream to be a Hollywood actress. One of the funiest lines from the book, Lucille says, "Chester said no, when he should've said yes." He'd still be alive. She drops their children off at her mother's and takes off as a fugitive. Peejoe is the only one she tells the whole story to, before she runs off. Along the way she gets into a number of funny situations, while back home in Alabama her family, in particular 12-year old Peejoe, are left to deal with the aftermath. A parallel story line in the book is the civil rights movement in small town Alabama and the very votile race relations during the times. I give Crazy in Alabama 5 out of 5 stars. The book was made into a movie and was the directorial debut of Antonio Bandraas. His wife Melanie Griffith starred as Lucille. I stongly suggest reading the book before watching the movie. The movie is not nearly as funny or well written as the book. Excellent book and a definite winner for author Mark Childress.

Whew..feels like I just got off a rollercoaster, but what a great ride it was. Crazy in Alabama is a wild, wonderful story of a summer of racial unrest in Alabama in 1965, and the experiences of two orphaned white boys living with their uncle in his funeral home. The book is told from the points of view of twelve year old Peter Joseph (Peejoe) and his Aunt Lucille. Lucille tells of her wild and crazy escapades to free herself from an opressive marriage and find her dream as an actress in Hollywood, leaving her six children behind with her mother. When a friend asked about the book, I tried to summarize the plot, and realized how crazy it all sounded, but somehow it works and is a very entertaining book. Good to the last page, it is a funny, crazy, wonderful book, but one with a serious side that reminded me of the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the marches and demonstrations, and how far we have come since then.