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Summary: A terrific read!
Review: Humane, funny, touching. Childress covers a lot of ground. He manages to set a tale involving the funeral home business, murder and mayhem and coming of age, against a backdrop of the civil rights movement of the '60s in the Deep South. It is a tremendous accomplishment and a great read. It will touch your heart.
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Summary: So good I named my dog after the main character...Peejoe!
Review: Mark Childress' "Crazy in Alabama" is, without question, the best piece of modern fiction I have ever read.
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Summary: The bizarre is hilarious; the hilarious is bizarre
Review: The other reviews must be trying to win the contest, because they forgot one minor thing: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....this book is hilarious, made more hilarious by the bizarre, made more bizarre by the truth, made more truthful because it makes you think. But not before you laugh.
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Summary: Witty, memorable; The South at its best and its worst.
Review: Childress uses that distinctly "southern" humor to marvelously intertwine individual craziness and societal insanity in this account of rural Alabama in the 1960s. Childress' sense of humor softens the sharp edges of the issues and reveals to the reader the lunatic logic at work in the minds of Crazy Aunt Lucille and the townsfolk of Industry, Alabama. His deftly recreated "Old South" where preposterous events were taken as a matter of course, and his well developed characters are an unforgettable variety that will stick with you as if you had lived next door
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Summary: Loved it!
Review: You will never forget Peejoe and Lucille! I just loved this book! It was so funny and memorable.... I want to read more by Mark Childress.
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Summary: Buy the book
Review: If you like to romp in the park, or people watch at the mall, then you will like this book. If you like to chuckle once in awhile or even laugh out loud, then you will like this book. This novel is about a young boy and his family including a crazy aunt in Alabama by the name of Lucille. There is a serious part regarding race relations, however, the highlights of the story involve Lucille and her antics.
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Summary: Tide Alum Pens A Winner w/ Crazy in Alabama
Review: The University of Alabama is known for having a winning tradition on the gridiron, but Alabama graduate Mark Childress is establishing a winning tradition of a different sort. His highly successful fiction book Crazy In Alabama is the funiest book I've ever read. Set in 1965, the reader is taken on a hillarious journey across country from Alabama to Hollywood
with Lucille, the wacko aunt of 12-year old Peejoe, the story's narrator, as she heads to audition for a part on the Beverly Hillbillies. Along for the ride in the back seat of a stolen Cadiallac, Lucille has the head of her husband Chester stored in a Tupperware lettuce crisper. Lucille gives Chester rat poison mixed in a cup of coffee, then decapitates him with the Sunbeam craving knife, because Chester refuses to let her go to Hollywood for the audition. It's Lucille's life long dream to be a Hollywood actress. One of the funiest lines from the book, Lucille says, "Chester said no, when he should've said yes." He'd still be alive. She drops their children off at her mother's and takes off as a fugitive. Peejoe is the only one she tells the whole story to, before she runs off. Along the way she gets into a number of funny situations, while back home in Alabama her family, in particular 12-year old Peejoe, are left to deal with the aftermath. A parallel story line in the book is the civil rights movement in small town Alabama and the very votile race relations during the times. I give Crazy in Alabama 5 out of 5 stars. The book was made into a movie and was the directorial debut of Antonio Bandraas. His wife Melanie Griffith starred as Lucille. I stongly suggest reading the book before watching the movie. The movie is not nearly as funny or well written as the book. Excellent book and a definite winner for author Mark Childress.
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Summary: Interesting, but why 2 stories?
Review: This book presents two different stories that are related only because the woman leading one of the stories is the mother of the boy leading the other. While both are interesting, you would think that the parties would eventually come together for some monumental accomplishment that both have worked together for. But this doesn't really happen, and it makes me wonder what the author's intent was in structuring it this way. The main story deals with a woman who kills her husband, leaves the rest of her family, and sets off on a cross-country odyssey. Oh yes, her husband's head is in a tupperware container as part of her luggage. We are informed by the woman that this was her way of ending an abusive relationship. However, as we get to know the nature of the woman, whether this is true or not is subject to debate. Her conversations with the head should steer you in the right direction on this. But her adventures, which include a guest role on "The Beverly Hillbillies", are entertaining enough to make this a great attempt at dark comedy. The other story concerns her son, who is left behind while mom "finds herself". He gets involved right in the middle of the 1960's Civil Rights movement after a racist encounter at a local swimming pool explodes into a national incident. While his story is not nearly as far-fetched as the other, is is the more moving of the two, and could have been a book in itself if the author gave it a chance. Which is the problem. You've got a dark comedy and a serious drama intertwining. I give the author a big thumbs up for reinforcing the true character of the mother with his ending, but once again, these are two different stories, and belong in two different books. Read it anyway.
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Summary: Woman Scorned
Review: Your homework for tonight: Drop everything and read Crazy in Alabama! This is such a great book -- much better than the movie. Mark Childress's carefully drawn characters come alive in these pages. Aunt Lucille will amaze you will all the nutty things she does. And Peejoe's story will have your heart breaking. It all starts when Aunt Lucille and her six children come ambling up the driveway of her mother's house early May 1965. She's killed her bullying husband and stashed his head in a Tupperware bowl (with a Press-and-Lock seal that really works!), and now with him out of the way, she's free to pursue her dream: to become an actress. Leaving her children with her mother, Lucille has zoomed off to Hollywood, evoking suspicion and evading arrest at every turn. Twisted into this story is another tale told through the eyes of 12-year-old Peejoe. He and his brother, Wiley, spend the summer in Industry, Alabama with Lucille's brother, Uncle Dove. As the county coroner and local funeral director, Dove has quite a busy summer ahead of him -- when Industry opens up their new "whites only" municipal swimming pool and the entire town takes a tragic turn. Crazy in Alabama is both riotous and rollicking as well as a sad reminder of the Civil Rights Movement and its history. Lucille's adventures will have readers laughing out loud as suppressed feelings awaken in her on her journey across the country. And the view through the innocent eyes of Peejoe will have readers wondering why all life's answers can't be so simple. An action-packed novel and one that won't be forgotten! Has all the qualities of a quirky southern tale that will amuse you and move you.
Rating: 
Summary: Silly, Irrelevant
Review: The civil rights movement which took place in the U. S. in the sixties was an extremely important era, and deserving of the massive number of historical and artistic interpretations it has received. Here is yet another novel with this period as its backdrop. It would be difficult to find another one with this subject matter that is more trivial and inconsequential. The novel consists of two concurrent stories. The first is written in the first person by Peejoe, an eleven year-old white orphan who lives, primarily, in Industry, Alabama, with first his grandmother, and then his uncle, the local undertaker. It takes place in 1965. The second is a third person narrative, and has to do with his aunt, Lucille. She is a 33 year-old woman with six children. In order to start a new life, she murders her husband and brings his decapitated head over to grandmaw's to show everybody. She then drags it around with her as she goes to New Orleans where she robs a bar, Las Vegas where she wins about thirty thousand dollars, and Los Angeles where she gets a part on the Beverly Hillbillies television program. In between she has wonderful sex with hunky bellboys and other oddballs. In the meantime, poor ol' Peejoe is witnessing some rough times in Industry. See, the rednecks first kill a young black man. Then, during a demonstration over a segregated swimming pool, they kill his brother. Soon, a lot of other black men and women are killed or beaten, and a lot of buildings are firebombed. This goes on with the sheriff's tacit if not outright approval. Hold your breath; I know this is hard to believe, but the sheriff is a racist and has a big beer belly. Peejoe, despite being only eleven years old, and a product of this place and these people, is nevertheless a model of sensitive and correct political thought, and is outraged by all of these events. He publicly sides with the black demonstrators. Like Bill Clinton's story about riding in the back of the bus to show his support for Rosa Parks, it is not terribly believable. But on the other hand, nothing else is either. Of course, the Lucille story was probably not meant to be, with its lurid, pulp-fiction, made-for-Hollywood plot. It is not clear, in fact, why this plot-line is in the book in the first place. But if it is there to illuminate some thematic quality of the more important civil rights story--again, a subject worthy of examination--it fails miserably, instead only serving to highlight the more improbable and ludicrous elements of it. Mr. Childress is a comptetent writer and knows how to sustain a narrative, but what he has constructed here, despite being occasionally entertaining, is lightweight and completely forgettable. He adds nothing which is fresh or new to what we know about the civil rights movement; peopling the opposition with standard, Southern-bumpkin caricatures, and grossly exaggerating the havoc created by them. What he does instead is to smugly congratulate his little Peejoe--and by extension himself--for merely coming to the correct political viewpoint. A viewpoint, I should add, which is today universally accepted. Big deal.
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