Customer Reviews

The Orange Blossom Special

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As I reached page 250 of "The Orange Blossom Special," I started feeling depressed, not because the story is sad, but because I knew that I would soon have to bid farewell to Betsy Carter's cast of uncommonly endearing characters. By the end of the book, they seem like your old friends, and I'm still thinking about them several weeks after forcing myself to turn the last page. But giving these folks original, leap-off-the-page personalities is not Carter's only skill. In her debut novel, she takes us to a mid-twentieth-century Florida that is so far from the sophisticated, fast-moving Gotham of her earlier offspring, the much-mourned monthly New York Woman, that you actually feel sweaty and unhurried as you're reading it. But Carter the fiction writer still has the same crackling wit, fabulous eye for detail and enormous compassion for the human condition that made her magazine such a winner and her memoir, "Nothing To Fall Back On," so appealing. The 1950s and 60s are vividly evoked here through the language and attitudes of the characters, historical and cultural events and references (Vietnam, Anita Bryant, even Davey Crockett) and all those great songs....In fact, the only way the book could be improved would be to have it include a soundtrack CD!

Betsy Carter, author of The Orange Blossom Special, gives readers an intimate look at a different time in our country. The time is the late 1950s where we find an uncomplicated sort of innocence, to the 1960s that are filled with turbulence and unrest.

The Orange Blossom Special is the first passenger train to connect New York to Miami. Tess, a widow of two years, and her daughter Dinah, who has lost her lust for life, decide to leave Carbondale to create a new life for themselves in Gainesville, Florida; the destination of the Orange Blossom Special.

People often say that you can't choose your family but you can choose your friends. In The Orange Blossom Special, Tess and Dinah create family by choosing them from various people they meet along the way. And through various trials and tribulations they ultimately realize that they have found their place - and it's called home.

Betsy Carter has a distinct voice and writes with humor and compassion. She is only going to improve with each book. I love the way she views the world, and I enjoy the multi-layered, rich characters in her book.

Betsy Carter's The Orange Blossom Special is so well-stocked with characters, events and tangible energy that it's hard to believe it's less than 300 pages long. Set in Florida, mostly during the 50's and 60's, the book follows the intertwined lives of a couple of teenage girls, their friends and families. Carter gets all the details right. Her senses of place and time are pitch perfect, from her description of the toniest beauty parlor in town to her evocation of a sultry Florida night. She knows what teenagers of the day wore and worried about, and she knows what their mothers cooked and worried about. Humane, funny and beautifully written, this book is so full of life it breathes. Highly recommended.

Although not the deepest book I have ever read, this is still a very good one. The only qualm I had about it was that I feel some of the characters (in fact, most of them) were either undeveloped or under-developed...the author skipped years in the lives of these people, years that I would have wanted to read about. Still, it is at times funny, at times sad, but always interesting, and you certainly walk away truly caring about the characters.

"The Orange Blossom Special" is an unaffected and endearing story that spans several decades from the 50s to the late 80s. It concerns a quirky but sweet recent widow, Tess, who is sinking into the bottle after the death of her beloved husband Jerry when she realizes that to save her life and the life of her teenaged daughter Dinah, she has to make a big change in their circumstances.

So on a whim, she moves them to Gainesville, Florida, and there starts a whole new existence. Except for the fact that she communes with her dead husband through notes in a cigar box, and that Dinah communes with him through "finger signals" from a disabled boy in class, they are both perfectly normal. Sort of.

Enter the spoiled ex-cheerleader wife and mother Victoria, whose entire life revolves around her hair, fingernails and decorating her ornate Florida mansion, and her long-suffering family, which includes a daughter who becomes unlikely friends with Dinah, and the book picks up. We follow our characters through the innocence of the 50s, the Civil Rights disturbances (in which Victoria's housekeeper Ella, and Victoria's son Charley become heroically entertwined), the Vietnam War, the excess of the 80s and beyond...and they stay, if not changed by life's circumstances, at least for all intents and purposes the sweet people they are.

A charming book; highly recommended.

Tessie and Dinah Lockhart move to Gainesville, Florida in 1958 to get away from the sad memories in Carbondale, Illinois. Jerry Lockhart, Tessie's husband, and Dinah's father died almost three years ago. Dinah joins a new school mid-year. She is able to become best friends with Crystal Landy. The story takes through the years as the Landys and the Lockharts grow up. Charlie Landy, Crystal's brother has many special gifts to give to the community. He falls in love with Dinah. Crystal and Dinah grow apart over the years but family and love bring them back together. Her mother Victoria is an unpredictable character, and tends to cause a great amount of anxiety to those around her. Tessie is able to fall in love even though Jerry is still a part of her life. This novel provides us with a unique glimpse of life in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.

I fell in love with the characters in this delightful novel. They're a mix of eccentric and "ordinary folk" and the author portrays them so affectionately and with such appreciation for their oddities that you can't help but root for them as they do their best to manage life's ups and downs. What's especially good about this novel is that the characters all change in unexpected and heartwarming ways. I was sorry to leave them behind at the end of the novel

The Orange Blossom Special is a debut book by Betsy Clark and I will be looking forward to more books by her in the future.

The Orange Blossom special covers almost 30 years in the life of two young girls Dinah and Crystal and their families. Although there are some terrible things that happen this book still leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling once you reach the end.

If you are a fan of southern fiction and coming of age books, I have a hunch that you will totally enjoy The Orange Blossom Special.

Betsy Carter's debut novel Orange Blossom Special is charming but it hits many an odd note for anyone familiar with Gainesville, or Florida.
The founder of one of the families in the book came to Gainesville in the 1920s and invested in developing a new buisiness near where the station was to be built for the first railroad to run from New York to Miami. The arrival of passenger service was of course expected to bring prosperity to the slowly developing town whose economy is built around lumber, phosphate and cotton. After the crash of 1929 brings development in Florida to a halt, he builds a liquor store on the site, which is to the right of of University Avenue headed south. Gainesville is a cracker town, a place where even in the 60s a Cuban would look out of place, where crocodiles may be found in local ponds, where hibiscus bushes thrive, and local boys follow Auburn football. Over the years many things change, but when the novel ends in 1986, you can still ride the train from Atlanta to Gainesville, and have lunch atop the tallest (and newest) building, before visiting the new golf resort right in the heart of town.
If none of this seems bizzare you will probably enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but if you are at all familiar with the area, you have to wonder if Ms. Carter ever set foot there, or, like Stephen Foster, just liked the sound of the name.

I had high expectations for this book, as it was suggested along with Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (a great book). Although the book let me down a little bit, I would still suggest it to anyone looking for a quick, heartfelt type of read. Although there are many depressing situations in the book, ie- the death of Tessie's and Victoria's husband, hatred shown in the civil rights movement, Charlie getting seriously injured in the Vietnam War, etc, the book as a whole isn't one that would make you cry and feel bad for the rest of the day. It's very light-hearted and touching in parts. Not bad at all as a whole.