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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, Kaye Gibbons at her finest prose and most tragic,
By A Customer
This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Hardcover)
This, Gibbon's latest work, is not her best, or perhaps a better way of saying it would be, her most literary, but it shows a side of this Southern author that was hiding in most of her earlier works. I've read the book several times, and though I am a male, I am a Southerner, and the book gives my shivers every time. It is the most beautifully tragic book I have ever read. (Shakespeare wrote plays, not books.) Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is, like most of Gibbons' main characters, strong, insightful, but none of the others have endured as much hardship as she has. The prose is, as usual, pitch-perfect, and though the characters are not greatly subtle in a post-modern way (to which we have perhaps become *too* accustomed), they are classic morality studies in themselves. This one blows GONE WITH THE WIND out of the water for Southern Romances. Kaye Gibbons is a consumate storyteller, and ON THE OCCASION OF MY LAST AFTERNOON is a stunning book.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great for a book group,
By A Customer
This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Paperback)
If you thought Cold Mountain was a good story, you'll like On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon for different reasons. Whereas Mountain was a love story, Occasion is one woman's story. Easy read, believable, entertaining. A good choice for a book group--mine gave it a thumb's up.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling style despite glaring historical inaccuracies,
By
This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Paperback)
Kaye Gibbons has a very breezy, readable style, and she has managed to capture very well the phrasing used in writings of the ante- and post-bellum period. I only wish her research had been done more carefully. As a long-time Virginia resident, I can safely say that her sense of the geography of this state is confused at best and downright wrong at its worst. She is also incorrect when she tells of wounded soldiers being transported from Gettysburg and Antietam all the way to Raleigh so that they can undergo surgery at the hands of the main character's husband. No soldier needing surgery would ever have made it such a great distance, and the railroads were in such a dismal state that the Confederacy could not have transported desperately wounded men that far, even if it had had a mind to. Wounded men were generally treated in farmhouses and churches and barns nearest the battlefield. However, her portrayal of hospital conditions is accurate, and her knowledge of medicine is impressive. Her characters, although interesting, are a little two-dimensional -- either tolerant and good and wise, or abusive and narrow-minded. No one is depicted with the usual beauties and warts we generally find in humans. It is a testament to the strength of Gibbons' style that I enjoyed reading the book despite these glaring problems.
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