Quite a Year for Plums

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Reading Quite a Year for Plums is like walking among the residents of a small town, becoming part of their lives and they part of yours, without ever being seen. Bailey White has an uncanny knack for creating characters that come alive. When I finished reading Quite a Year for Plums I was left with the same empty feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had the day I moved from my childhood home in rural Virginia.

Like moving to a new locale, it takes a while to get to know each of the characters. My only criticism of the novel is that during the first few chapters I often found the need to refer to the list of characters. When I purchased the book, I believed that a cast list for a relatively short novel was presumptuous. I later learned that it was a necessity.

I highly recommend Quite a Year for Plums, as well as Mama Makes Up her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel.

Rating:
Summary: Quite a topsy turvy book!
Review: It's one thing to make your readers work, but it's another to make the reader work, and then for nothing.

Thank goodness I got this from the library. White may be good on NPR, but she's definitely not good here. The first chapters had me referring constantly to the list of characters, simply because White throws you a new name every other paragraph. With other books, this isn't a problem, the problem here is the author seems to give us the names, but no other information. Sure, there's dialogue, but I need some kind of identifying characteristic, White! Tell me if their eyes are blue, brown, are they tall, short, thin, have hair, no hair, STUFF!!! It was a pain getting through the first few chapters. I had trouble remembering who was who. The other thing that adds to the difficulty is the fact that there seems to be no plot. (Makes it even harder to remember who's trying to accomplish what) AND, because there's no "plot", halfway through the book, after a fund-raising picnic and a bird art exhibition, I started to wonder what was the point of all this, then I stopped wondering and returned the book to the library.

Rating:
Summary: CHARACTERS WHO TOUCH YOUR HEART
Review: Popular radio commentator Bailey White's first novel abounds with smile-provoking snapshots of lovable yet eccentric inhabitants of rural Georgia, very much like her early collections of vignettes - Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping At The Starlite Motel. The plot line may be thin in Quite A Year For Plums, but the countryside is thick with idiosyncratic characters who touch your heart.

Roger, a "U. Of Ga. Plant pathologist" whose specialty is peanuts, has been divorced by Ethel, a schoolteacher with a rapacious appetite for men. Her conquests include Jim Wade, an avid collector of desk fans; a Nashville songwriter; and a boat builder who leaves her home carpeted in wood shavings.

Ethel's adventuresome spirit may have been inherited from her mother, Louise, who is convinced spacemen regularly visit their community. She times alien visits with her Wal-Mart clock, while attempting to lure them with combinations of rusty cast-off letters and numbers. Now living with Eula, her sister, Louise spends her days arranging Cheerios and Scrabble tiles in varying designs as she awaits the next intrusion from outer space.

Serious and dedicated to protecting the seedlings in his care, Roger stoically accepts his unsought singleness. He also accepts squash casseroles and the solicitous ministrations of Meade and Hilma, two retired school teachers, best friends who have read aloud to each other "on their Thursday evenings in May" for the past 50 years. Meade is known for volunteering to cross-stitch the Christian symbol of a fish on 28 church kneeling cushions. Instead of sewing "the simple oval and triangle....she had sewn twenty-eight species of indigenous fish, all recognizable by little stitched details of form and color: warmouth perch, crappie, bluegill, large-mouthed bass."

Before long some dumpster cast-offs and their accompanying explanatory notes catch Roger's eye. They're the discards of Della, a visiting bird artist who has the temerity to enter a painting of chickens, albeit Dominiques, "to the most important wildlife art show in the world." He's a goner when he spies a fan and observes that she can spell "oscillate." As he says, "I admire good spellers."

While Roger can hold a grange meeting in thrall, volubly addressing "Living with Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus," his courting skills are negligible. Della leaves him "for the birds of the southern hemisphere." Thus, twice rejected and fragile he must face alone a party for the retiring dean of the plant pathology department. "Poor Roger," a sympathetic Hilma remarks, "having to entertain agricultural scientists and fry fish with a broken heart."

The world created by Bailey White, a raconteur with limitless wit, imagination, and good will, may seem implausible - a revisionist's description of life in small town America. Is there really a place where the local library's latest decor boasts a giant stuffed "white and black goose flying over the fax machine, its withered orange feet dangling into the paper tray," where women punctuate sentences by flapping their aprons, and where neighbors overlook past slights to care for one another? We can only hope so.

With the author's inspired eye for detail and gift for finding humor in the commonplace, Quite A Year For Plums is a generous, often hilarious, rendering of simple pleasures bursting with joy and down home joie de vivre. Ms. White is heard on National Public Radio - she is a national treasure.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: A Different Bailey White
Review: I have read and dearly loved both collections of short stories by Ms. White and was excited when I found this novel. A little red flag went up with the cast of character list as if it indicated that the reader would need a program to follow the play. Unfortunately, this was the case. The characters were a bit too quirky and the first half of the book seems not to belong to the same story as the second half. I finished the novel with a quizzical look--not at all the same laugh-out-loud humor and wonderfully drawn characters in the short stories. Sometimes real life is more entertaining than fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Well...let's just say I like her short pieces better...
Review: NPR is Bailey White's home, and this novel, full of eccentric oddballs with a thin story line, makes me think she should stick to those short schticks in the future. Good characterization, especially Roger, a plant pathologist and peanut virologist who may or may not be falling in love with Della, a bird artist.
White's gentle humor and affection for life's slightly weird travelers makes this a fun read.

Rating:
Summary: Whimsical and witty
Review: Whimsical and witty...two words I would definitely not hesitate to use in description of this enjoyable little novel by Bailey White. Quite A Year For Plums dwells on the slightly off-center antics of small-town citizens in south Georgia, and boasts an array of characters who breathe life into every-day occurrences. There's Roger, a quiet peanut pathologist who is a bit of an unlikely hometown celebrity. There's Meade and Eula, two elderly spinsters who believe it is their sole purpose in life to protect "their" Roger from having his heart broken...again. Then there's somewhat subdued and eccentric Della -an artist who is obsessed with painting painstakingly detailed portraits of birds- who Roger falls head over peanuts for. Without even meeting Della, the peanut pathologist is captivated by the mysterious yet practical notes the artist leaves on the perfectly useful things she leaves at the community dump. There's not much else to say about Plums except that I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this simple yet touching novel. It honestly put a smile on my face with nearly every turn of the page and had me saying to myself almost enviously, "Why couldn't I have thought of that?"

Rating:
Summary: Don,t bother
Review: Confusing and depressing. No start,ending OR anything inbetween!

Rating:
Summary: Quite a Year for Plums
Review: Yikes...what a confusing, unsatisfying book. I had to keep looking at the list of characters the author supplied in the front of the book to keep everyone straight. For a book this short and lackluster, another fifty characters wouldn't help. Off to the free book bin at the library with this one.

Rating:
Summary: I Bailed Before the Year Was Over
Review: A dear friend who also happens to love birds recommended this one. I listened to the first three tapes and had to quit from lack of enthusiasm. I felt like I was visiting with quirky relatives who lost their charm after a time. The story ambled on with no point or hooks to keep my interest.

Rating:
Summary: God I hated this book
Review: I amazed myself at my powerful dislike of this book. Half way through it I felt like I was Waiting for Godot. Or just waiting for SOMETHING to happen.

This book begins with a list of characters. This is always a red flag to me that I am about to embark on a journey with an author who didn't bother to take the time to develop characters compelling enough so that I wouldn't HAVE to keep turning back to the list to figure out who I was reading about. I find them completely distracting and a major cop-out on the part of the author. In QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS, the list consists of grumpy old women and the men unfortunate enough to inhabit their lives. This was a book club selection and had it not been for my comittment to the group, I would have thrown this book in the trash before completing the first chapter.

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