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Rating: 
Summary: This story will touch you unexpectedly.
Review: "Taking Lottie Home : A Novel" is a good summer read that will pull you in, without knowing it. I saw this book on the discount shelves at the nearby conglomerate bookstore, and with its warm cover, I bought it. I was worried that the plot would revolve around baseball, but it only ties the characters together. It revolved back to teamwork and comradeship. The chapters will fly by, and before you know it, you're at the epilogue. That's where the story lost me, and I became confused. The references to grandma, Gra-Ma, mother, father, etc., made me confused about who was who. It's best to just leave off after the final chapter is finished. An enjoyable read. I recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book
Review: At first I didn't like this book. I picked it up and thought, oh great, it's about baseball. How wrong was I when I picked this one up at a bookstore? So I put it down. A few days later, after finding myself at loose ends because nothing I picked up sounded good, I gave it a try again. And this time, I was hooked. Terry Kay's writing just ensared me and I couldn't put the book down till the last page was turned.Kay's characters just came alive in this book ~~ their dreams, their passions, their loves and fears. This is an wonderful book that will haunt you with its lyrical writing and true characters. There is Ben who is kicked off the Augusta baseball team at the same time as Foster Lanier, an older baseball player. They meet up again on the way home from the baseball fields. Ben struggles to make a life again in his hometown, Jericho, as he struggles with ending his dreams of playing baseball. Throughout his life, he kept track of his best friend Milo who did remain behind to play ball and eventually played for Boston Red Sox. Then there is Lottie, the woman he meets on his journey home ~~ and he continues to meet her over the years. And this is their story ~~ of friendship and eventually taking Lottie home. Foster married Lottie and fathered her son, but Ben took her home. It's an enchanting story of the deep South at the beginning of the 20th century. These characters are just as real as your grandparents were ~~ and very interesting too. It's a great book to read on a lazy day swinging on the hammock ~~ just be prepared with lemonade and cookies ~~ once you start reading this book, you don't want it to stop! 5-25-04
Rating:
Summary: Train ride with Little Ben, Georgia Peach, & the Carny Girl
Review: Ben Phelps and Foster Lanier share a train ride home in 1904 after being cut from a low minor league baseball squad in Georgia. Another Georgian not only makes the cut, he advances quickly to the major leagues, where he is universally hated by the players for his dirty style of play and the public for tales of his wife-beating, drinking, and low-living. Ultimately, he becomes the top player of his age and very wealthy through Georgian business ventures (think Cobb and Coca-Cola), but he always refuses to see the old town and gang. Ben and Foster meet Lottie Parker on that train. This enigmatic creature is both innocent and way too worldly for her teenage years, but never one to be forgotten. Lottie changes their lives for several generations. Foster and Lottie marry, and name their son Little Ben. Ben goes home, takes a job in the dry goods store, and becomes engaged to the proprietor's daughter. Foster, Lottie, and Ben have a subsequent encounter; when Foster and Lottie are working a travelling carnival baseball game of skill, they make Ben look like the town hero and get him very nearly killed. Several years pass and then Ben comes to see a dying Foster, who makes him promise to take Lottie home. Both Ben and Little Ben take ill, and end up in the care of Ben's lonely widowed mother and Ben's fiancee. Lottie becomes the talk of the town, first rumours spread that she and Ben had an illicit relationship, then she wins over all with her charm and grace, then she falls in love with Ben's long-suffering father-in-law, finally she leaves town to return home, just as rumour surface that she is the famous carny girl of many years earlier. I have not read any other Terry Kay novels, and I highly recommend this one. It has a few slow places, especially in the beginning, but it gracefully ties together America's past-times of baseball, commerce, and raising families in the hard-scrabble turn of the century days without much medicine, transportation, employment, or money, especially in the rural South.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I always enjoy books like this which are set in the early 1900's. Even though there is the threat of war, things seem to be much simpler--people a lot more laid back. Although the book itself was a nice, quiet read, I didn't care much for Lottie. Although she was supposedly one of the main characters, I enjoyed the book more when I placed her in the setting of a secondary character and stopped focusing on when and where she was going to fit into the storyline.
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to Kay's potential
Review: I found the first half of Kay's novel reminiscent of To Dance With the White Dog. Reading that book is what brought me to Taking Lottie Home. But, I was disappointed overall. At about the halfway point, the story seemed to take a left turn into soap opera-land. It was as though written by two different people. ... I thought it a shame the promise of the beginning wasn't kept through to the end.
Rating:
Summary: hauntng, lyrical exploration of love's mysterious connection
Review: Reading Terry Kay's huanting and wrenching "Taking Lotte Home" brings the reader in the hands of a writer who is completely comfortable with a genuine mastery of his craft. This novel is an engrossing work which not only absorbs the reader's attention with its sensitive and provocative treatment of the twin themes of fulfilled and unrequited love; it engages the reader in a profoundly personal manner through its exploration o the inner lives of its complex, sympathetic and utterly believable characters. Set at the turn of the twentieth century in rural Georgia, "Taking Lottie Home" is an utterly modern novel as well; its characters' yearnings, frustrations and anxieties elicit the deepest sympathies from the reader. "Taking Lottie Home" treats an enigmatic, yet magnetic, girl-woman, Lottie Barton and her eliptical travels through the rural southeast in an attempt to discover "home." Lottie's exquisite physical beauty casts a surreal attraction from both lustful men and jealous women. The product of squalid poverty and blighted hopes, Lottie ironically becomes the focus of a liberating friendship with Ben Phelps, whose altruistic interest in Lottie results in numerous moral conundrums. In her life's travels, Lottie, through volition and resignation, has submitted to prostitution, an troubled marriage and attractions understated, Lottie becomes the focus of the three main male characters in the novel. The aforementioned Ben Phelps befriends Lottie and serves as her guardian at the request of his baseball-playing friend, Foster Lanier. Lanier and Phelps share blighted athletic careers, though their friendship circles around Lottie. Lanier marries Lottie and fathers her child; Ben learns that platonic love carries explosive connotations. Ben's ultimate employer, Arthur Ledford, will nurture his own complicated relationship with Lottie, and Kay masterfully interweaves the complications of these connections throughout the novel. One of the marvelous qualities of "Taking Lottie Home" is that although it is not a terribly original book, it succeeds on every level. Kay's creative treatment of the awful consequences of tormeted silence, innocent deceit and unfulfilled dreams is nothing less than brilliant. Lottie and Ben arouse enormous empathy as they grapple with their decisions and directions. The author's accurate portrait of small-town Southern life some hundred years ago strengthens the novel's thematic coherence and integrity of characterization. "Taking Lottie Home" packs an enormous emotional wallop; it is an inspirational, challenging and evocative triumph.
Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly Beautiful
Review: Some books, as well as characters, can haunt you for days, maybe years, after the reading is done. "Taking Lottie Home" is such a book. And Lottie Lanier is just such a character: part girl, part woman, and all too giving, with eyes no one ever forgets. So, too, is the character Ben Phelps, the young would-be dream-catcher, who catches the ball but only worships the dream, living it vicariously through the faraway exploits of the intangible, aloof Milo Wade. And there's Foster Lanier, who tastes the dream, only to see it turn bitter before finding his final, brief comfort in the arms of Lottie. Then there is Arthur Ledford, a lonely, tormented, fair but angry man, whose role in Lottie's life turns out to be nearly as surprising as Lottie herself. Even the minor characters are hard to forget: Ben's mother, Margaret Phelps, who clings to Lottie's child, little Ben; Ben's fiancee, Sally, who sees Lottie as the greatest threat to her happiness; Arthur's wife, Alice, a cold, hateful woman who seems to believe all women should be miserable by nature; Coleman Maxey, a pain-in-the-butt redneck troublemaker, and an assortment of other town characters who are either enthralled by Lottie or unnerved by her. There is also the strangest alliance of carnival bad guys ever to appear in a Kay novel: a one-armed giant and a midget. Lottie's story takes place in early 1900's Georgia and Kentucky, when it was still the train that took people to faraway places. It, too, could be considered a character in this story, as could the town of Jerico, which sounds a lot like long ago Royston, Georgia, just as Milo Wade sounds a lot like the baseball great Ty Cobb. Two great contemporary Southern writers are Terry Kay and Pat Conroy. It struck me, while reading this book, that the two men are interesting contrasts, especially regarding the way they write about the South. It reminds me of two men I once heard trying to describe the taste of a persimmon. Both liked the taste, but one said it was bitter, with a little sweet in it; the other said it was more sweet than bitter. For bittersweet stories about the South, it's hard to beat Conroy or Kay. And "Taking Lottie Home" is a sweet story, with just the right amount of bitter. It's the kind of story that stays with you for a long, long time.
Rating:
Summary: Take a sentimental journey with Lottie and her friends.
Review: The first book I read by Terry Kay was Shadow Song followed by To Dance with the White Dog which also became a wonderful television production a few years ago. Now with his latest book, Taking Lottie Home, Mr. Kay capitaves his reading audience with a sentimental tale which not only evokes a different era but wholesome and well meaning characters with the very best of values. On a train home, two men recently discharged from a minor baseball team meet Lottie, a young woman with a questionable past. Ben returns home to his mother while Foster marries Lottie and they have a son and a good marraige. When Foster dies, though, it wa shis wish that Ben accompany Lottie home to her family to continue raising their son. But Lotties family and home life isn't conducive to raising a child so she returns to Ben's hometown where she spends time living with Ben's mother and also meets Ben's future father-in-law. And in a stunning turn of events, Lottie leaves these people who truly care about her but not before she also leaves a part of herself with them. This is a wonderful book which will intoduce you to some fine characters you would be proud to call friends if they lived in your town. Enjoy!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Take a sentimental journey with Lottie and her friends.
Review: The first book I read by Terry Kay was Shadow Song followed by To Dance with the White Dog which also became a wonderful television production a few years ago. Now with his latest book, Taking Lottie Home, Mr. Kay capitaves his reading audience with a sentimental tale which not only evokes a different era but wholesome and well meaning characters with the very best of values. On a train home, two men recently discharged from a minor baseball team meet Lottie, a young woman with a questionable past. Ben returns home to his mother while Foster marries Lottie and they have a son and a good marraige. When Foster dies, though, it wa shis wish that Ben accompany Lottie home to her family to continue raising their son. But Lotties family and home life isn't conducive to raising a child so she returns to Ben's hometown where she spends time living with Ben's mother and also meets Ben's future father-in-law. And in a stunning turn of events, Lottie leaves these people who truly care about her but not before she also leaves a part of herself with them. This is a wonderful book which will intoduce you to some fine characters you would be proud to call friends if they lived in your town. Enjoy!!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Story
Review: This was my first Terry Kay novel and now I am going to run, not walk, to my Library in hopes that it will have all the rest of his works. I will not waste space summarizing the story as other reviewers have done a super job but I do want to say that there is something wrong with Oprah's opinion if she or whoever selects her book of the month if this one isn't selected in the very near future. I have read most of "her" selections and this is better than many of them. Another good one for those who like Southern settings is Home Across the Road by Nancy Peacock. I really hated for this one to end and would love a sequel based on what really happened to Lottie and her life after this one. Mr. Kay, where have you been all my life?????
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