44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like the flower in its title, this book is a perennial., March 24, 1998
I read this book as a teenager -- as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book in the 60's -- and never forgot it. In about 1990 I found it in a library and read the full novel. The Moonflower Vine is an exquisite portrait of a rural family and the forces that both bind them together and push them apart. Matthew Soames is a farmer/schoolteacher who wants to live in more than one world. His wife Callie is content with the life Matthew has put her in, even content to remain illiterate in the face of his constant studies. They and their four highly individualistic daughters (including one who flies off with an early, amateur aviator) each have a story to tell, and a secret to keep. In today's age of "tell all" there is something both guilty and immensely pleasurable about keeping this secret with them. The plot is not, however, contrived. Carleton's style is plain, in some ways. At the same time, it offers more: you sit down to a meal of meat-and-potatoes prose; then the salads and side dishes start arriving. It's a lavish feast of words.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Family, faith, rebellion; secrets, love, independence; and time, July 4, 2006
I have re-read this book probably more often than any other book in my adult life. The story unfolds in rural Missouri over the first two-thirds of the 20th century, but its themes and its allure are timeless: family, faith, rebellion, secrets, love, independence, and time. Matthew and Callie Soames raise four daughters: Jessica, Leonie, Mary Jo, and Mathy. The book tells their stories one lifetime at a time, starting with the oldest daughter, Jessica, who introduces us to her parents and siblings and their life growing up in the Ozarks. Then we meet Matthew, the father, whose inner life and story -- and whose foolish heart -- are a far cry from the stern schoolmaster who rules his home and his daughters' lives with an austere and lonely love. ("To his daughters as they grew up, Matthew Soames was God and the weather." His character has often reminded me of the father in Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays.") Mathy, the youngest daughter, is the family's most vivid and most tragic character, a free spirit who flies a little too close to the sun. Leonie is her father's daughter, but also a child of her era, and through her Matthew is ultimately reconciled to Mathy.
But each lifetime is only a piece in the puzzle of the Soames family until Callie, the strong, understated matriarch, who keeps the hardest secret of all; not until her story is told do all the others finally come together into a whole portrait, even though each story before hers seemed whole enough on its own. The book's title comes from the flowers that bloom for one night a year in the Ozarks, when the family reunites to watch them bloom for such a short season. The last chapter of Callie's story, when she suddenly finds herself an old woman and the reader suddenly discovers that half a century has passed with the Soameses, is one of the most penetrating insights into aging that I have ever read.
"The Moonflower Vine" contains as many tragedies as a family could normally expect in half a century, but not too many, and overall it is an affirming and empowering novel. But its saddest fact doesn't appear in the novel at all -- that Jetta Carleton, whose literary debut is a masterpiece, never wrote another book. "The Moonflower Vine" was an overnight sensation when it was published in 1962 -- a Literary Guild selection, and a Reader's Digest Condensed Book in 1963. But four decades later, Jetta Carleton and her book are nearly forgotten. Jetta Carleton Lyon lived a full and happy life, moving in 1970 to New Mexico, where she ran a small publishing company until her death in 1999. "The Moonflower Vine" was reprinted by Bantam in 1984, and by Buccaneer in 1995.
My grandmother collected Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and I discovered "The Moonflower Vine" as a child at her home years later (in the same volume with "The Shoes of the Fisherman" by Morris West). Soon afterward, I had to read the whole novel. A quarter century has passed, and I still can't pick it up without reading it again. And I never put it down without a catch in my throat.
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43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My absolute favorite book of all time!, August 27, 1999
I first read "The Moonflower Vine" in the summer of 1972, when I would put my children to bed for their naps. It has become my ritual every summer to reread this book. I not only feel that I know these characters personally, but the story reminds me of a simpler time when I spent my afternoons tending my garden and reading and watching my children play in the sun. I would love to have Jetta Carleton's gift. She has said what so many of us wish we could say about our families - "...all the days that we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more?" I had no idea that copies of this book were so hard to come by. I will now treasure it even more. If you can find it, and have not read it, please do so. Then plant some moonflowers of your own. You'll never forget this story.
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