Rating: 
Summary: Quite a topsy turvy book!
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
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