I know I already said this book was excellent, but I was only about a hundred pages into it at the time. Now that I've finished the book, I can tell you for sure: this book is excellent.
I stumbled across The Splendor Falls at Barnes & Noble. Usually I just write down the books I want to read later, but when I read the first couple of sentences of this one to see if I might want to read it, I didn't want to put it back on the shelf, so I actually bought it.
Our protagonist is Sylvie Davis, a ballerina who's broken her leg and can't dance anymore. She had an incident caused by mixing Vicodin and champagne at her mother's wedding, which means she doesn't get to stay home in Manhattan while her mom goes off on her honeymoon. Instead she's shipped off to stay with her dad's Cousin Paula in Alabama. This is not Sylvie's preferred way to spend the summer: "I wanted to hate Alabama, and nothing about my arrival disappointed me."
( Spoilers ) One of the interesting things about the book is how distinctly PG it is. There aren't even any swear words in the text. ( More spoilers. )
I don't think I'm really doing justice to this book, and you really should just read it. Sylvie is an extremely compelling narrator, and the plot is excellently well done.
( More spoilers. )
The last non-spoilery things I'll tell you about are two potential triggers/annoyances. First, Sylvie was a ballerina and Cousin Paula's partner Clara's daughter Addie wants to be a model, so there are some discussions about food and calories that might be triggering. For me, they weren't particularly bothersome, especially since it was much more mild than I expected from a ballerina narrator. Secondly, as a white (at least as far as I can tell) author writing about white characters, Clement-Moore gets to mostly sidestep the race issues inherent in Sylvie's family having owned this estate in the South since before the Civil War. She doesn't avoid them altogether - Clara and Addie are black and live in one of the outer buildings, Clara makes a comment about the parallel of her (implied slave) ancestors having lived outside of the big house, and Sylvie wonders if their family's slave-owning history is part of what made her dad leave - but this is not a book that delves deeply into that aspect of the town's history.
I have promised my mother that she can borrow the book, but if any of you would like to have it after she's done, just let me know.
I stumbled across The Splendor Falls at Barnes & Noble. Usually I just write down the books I want to read later, but when I read the first couple of sentences of this one to see if I might want to read it, I didn't want to put it back on the shelf, so I actually bought it.
Our protagonist is Sylvie Davis, a ballerina who's broken her leg and can't dance anymore. She had an incident caused by mixing Vicodin and champagne at her mother's wedding, which means she doesn't get to stay home in Manhattan while her mom goes off on her honeymoon. Instead she's shipped off to stay with her dad's Cousin Paula in Alabama. This is not Sylvie's preferred way to spend the summer: "I wanted to hate Alabama, and nothing about my arrival disappointed me."
( Spoilers ) One of the interesting things about the book is how distinctly PG it is. There aren't even any swear words in the text. ( More spoilers. )
I don't think I'm really doing justice to this book, and you really should just read it. Sylvie is an extremely compelling narrator, and the plot is excellently well done.
( More spoilers. )
The last non-spoilery things I'll tell you about are two potential triggers/annoyances. First, Sylvie was a ballerina and Cousin Paula's partner Clara's daughter Addie wants to be a model, so there are some discussions about food and calories that might be triggering. For me, they weren't particularly bothersome, especially since it was much more mild than I expected from a ballerina narrator. Secondly, as a white (at least as far as I can tell) author writing about white characters, Clement-Moore gets to mostly sidestep the race issues inherent in Sylvie's family having owned this estate in the South since before the Civil War. She doesn't avoid them altogether - Clara and Addie are black and live in one of the outer buildings, Clara makes a comment about the parallel of her (implied slave) ancestors having lived outside of the big house, and Sylvie wonders if their family's slave-owning history is part of what made her dad leave - but this is not a book that delves deeply into that aspect of the town's history.
I have promised my mother that she can borrow the book, but if any of you would like to have it after she's done, just let me know.