Customer Reviews

Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s

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Digges is best known for her poetry, but this novel - a memoir - is a beautifully prolonged and powerful sigh of prose that wafts us from Digges' childhood through her adolescence, college, and first (failed) marriage to deposit us gently beside an unsteady but undaunted woman approaching middle age.

I am not a poetry fan, and have not read Digges' poetry, but I can imagine from this book that she is very talented. Her prose is like poetry--beautiful to read and able to bring strong emotions to the reader, but as a memoir this book is a little frustrating. So much is started and not finished, or told about in bits and pieces. We are told of her mother's very tough last birth (the author is one of 10 children) but never what made it so tough or what the outcome is, we are told she has problems in her first marriage that lead to divorce, but never really are shown what is wrong in the marriage, and indeed all the people in this book don't come alive for me, including her parents, who are central characters. I don't mean to discourage reading of this book, I am very glad I read it and enjoyed it a great deal. I love her way of describing specific incidents, like her first week of college when she was so homesick or high school home ec, but I wish there was more to this book---I'd have loved to know more about her and more specifics on her life!