Rating: 
Summary: What a gem of a book!
Review: What a delightful read! The only negative part was that it had to end. I just wanted to stay with all of these characters for more and more adventures and everyday events. Please, Ms. White, you absolutely MUST come out with a sequel!!!
Rating: 
Summary: A good beach book. Funny and entertaining.
Review: Enjoyable. Some very funny passages. A comfortable gentle summer read. I enjoyed the characters and their obsessions.
Rating:
Summary: full of middle, no ending
Review: Baily White knows how to develop characters and fills the book with great ones. That is the good news. The so-so news is that the book is almost without beginning. I felt as if I had walked into the middle of a movie without knowing the early part of the plot and without the list of characters provided, I would have been totally lost. The middle is chocked full of great stories, but there is no ending. When I reached the last page of the book, I was surprised there wasn't another page to turn. Some of the events were left incomplete or maybe the readers are to supply their own ideas as to what happened. In spite of that, I found that I was remembering things that I had not thought of in years, such as Dominecker and Buff Orphington chickens, and reminiscing about my grandmother's pre Civil War family home place. Ms White knows south Georgia and the aristocrats who still serve tea on white linen daily and who can trace their flowers' ancestries as well as they can! ! their own. I will read other books by Ms White despite my few reservations about Plums. I like the reminiscinces.
Rating:
Summary: A story of loves
Review: With the debut of "Quite a Year for Plums", Bailey White has written a unique and charming first novel. She maintains her "vignette" style of presentation but manages to extend it with her usual hodge-podge set of characters. It is a love story. But not in the usual sense of that literary form. Ms. White gently hands us a series of love stories. Stories about the love of waterfowl and wildfires, of art and type, of evenings with friends, of electric fans and spacemen. She asks us to understand that love is about seeing. Looking closely enough at the world and people around us until they become a part of us. We can begin to "see" clearly and love without strings. There is no love lost for those who cannot (or will not) take the time to closely observe and learn about the things and people around them. Enter the young, suburbanite couple with their artificial eagles. "City dwellers" without time or inclination to lea! ! rn the names of the real birds inhabiting their woods. People whose only sense of nature is that it is capable of stinging and biting those who are careless in the way in which they interact with it. Nature is real, just like people. Ms. White asks us to take the time to see and learn about life around us. All the things in life that bring blessing and pain. And as any good first grade teacher will tell you, it is a lesson in love given with love.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful - and a beautiful cover to top it off
Review: I buy a fair number of books, usually paperbacks, although sometimes I'll buy an audio book to listen to in the car. There also are a few authors whom I like so much that I throw credit card to the wind and buy the hardback as soon as it comes out. Bailey White, however, is a wonderful buy in any medium and I buy BOTH the printed books, in hardback, AND the audio books-the printed books because she is such a fine and gifted writer; the audio books because she is a marvelous storyteller, her voice a slow, gentle rasp which gives her stories wonderful shape and character.QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS, has the same sensibility as her previous autobiographical essays but in a fictionalized context. The characters all have that quirky charm I love, expressed through writing that has a firm grasp of the natural world, art, and literature. Although set in small rural towns, the characters live rich expansive lives through large and exploring minds. And to top it off, sometimes she's just plain hilarious. I read and listen to her with a constant smile, broken only by periodic bursts of laughter or a sudden intake of breath as she utters a phrase of remarkable beauty and poignancy. In a word, she is simply WONDERFUL.
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Summary: Shazaam
Review: Bailey White's book is great but I don't think she really captured the radiant sex appeal of the plant pathologists that I know.
Rating:
Summary: As spry as banjo music played with all five fingers.
Review: This batch of "connected stories" takes you on a delightful and... and... and....educational journey through the swamps, camellia gardens, peanut fields, garbage dumpsters, heartbreaks and irony mines of South Georgia. These stories are as frangrant as the Madame Isaac Pierre, as tasty as a Vidalia Onion sandwich, and as alive and spry as banjo music played with all five fingers. You'll feel the heat of the South Georgia sun as you help Roger Meadows place little colored flags beside peanut plants with Tomato Spotted Wilt virus and spend a July day "stooped in the peanut field, steeped in sweat". You'll meet the fickle Betty Sheffield Supreme, and you'll learn to spell "Attapulgus", "oscillate" and "thrips with an s". You'll be introduced to the science of plant pathology and the horrible botanical malady of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus that really does plague farmers and gardeners in Grady Co., Georgia and worldwide. You'll find yourself asking "What in Thysanoptera (that's not a dirty word.. I promise) is a thrip?" only to have Ms. White and Dr. Meadows gently remind you that there is no such critter as a "thrip". "Thrips" is both singular and plural. Shazaam! You should be warned that reading this book may render you hopelessly and incurably addicted to peanuts and Vidalia Onion sandwiches, and incite in you uncontrollable urges to raise and paint your very own (and nobody elst-es) Dominecker (sic) chickens. What's more, after reading "The Book Formerly Known as Vectored by Thrips", never, never again will you be able to pass by a public garbage dumpster without wondering if it might hold the keys to the love of your life.
Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly entertaining
Review: Rural Georgia typifies small town living. It is a place where everyone knows everyone else and nature is a major part of living. Everyone knows their plants and animals. Roger is a plant pathologist, who has made it inside Agrisearch magazine for his work with peanut diseases. Roger's former wife Ethel still teaches school in the area. Della is a wildlife artist, who is visiting in order to paint portraits of the local birds. Though she is as birdy as her models, Roger finds himself falling in love with her or perhaps it is Lucy, a nematologist that he loves. If readers are seeking action on an epic scale by ordinary people, than QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS is clearly not their book. However, anyone who desires a jocular series of vignettes that capture the lifestyle of a small Georgia rural town, than Bailey White's debut novel is the right cup of plum pudding. The novel is quite droll yet touching as the story captures Ms. White's unique brand of humor. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Of Dominickers, Electric fans, typopgraphy and love
Review: When I began the audio edition of this book, I was taken aback by Bailey White's whispery, "old lady" voice, which still surprises me. But in short order it became clear that her voice and her fictional world blended perfectly and only added to the beauty of the tale. I may, of course, as a long-time resident of Tallahassee, FL, be biased, but I was charmed by the eccentric backwoodsiness of the book's characters. We come to know the bird artist who throws out her possessions as an inspiration to her painting; the fan-man, to whom a 1910 GE electric fan represents perfection; the typographer, who values the juxtaposition of letters more than his wife; Roger, the peanut expert whose portrait between two peanut plants is a recurring theme in the book; and of course the several charming old ladies whose knowledge of south Georgia flora and fauna is encyclopedic. But none of these brief descriptions really give the rich, delicious flavor of the world in which all these folk live. Any one of these characters would enrich an ordinary book. To find them all in one place is extraordinary. This slim volume has been criticized for lack of plot, but I think the plot is rich and deep. It is not, however, a dramatic, fast-paced, "page turner" type plot. Rather, we are given a glimpse into one year in the life of an extraordinary community. When the year is ended, life in the community goes on, no better and no worse than before, but unfortunately, without an audience to drink it in.
Rating:
Summary: A Charmer
Review: I loved this book from start to finish. Life isn't about plot, it's about the little events that shape your life each day. Sometimes you can only see the plot when you get to the end and look backwards, and I think that's the style captured so gracefully here. It's a book with no heroes, no villans, just people with fragile human hearts. The humor is very dry, you will miss it if you aren't paying attention. But the effortless storytelling is very engaging.
If you want something to HAPPEN, if you want some grand GESTURE, and if you have to have everything about life EXPLAINED to you before it makes sense, pass on this book. If you like sitting on the porch with a good friend and listening to the events of their day over a glass of iced tea, then this book will suit you. It's about being in the company of quality people, and knowing that whatever they say will be worth the time to listen.
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