Rating: 
Summary: Powerful and Heart-Wrenching
Review: I read this book as part of a college literature assignment. Bastard Out of Carolina is a well-written, deeply moving, and unforgettable novel about a young southern girl's struggle with physical and sexual abuse, along with the stigma of being labeled "white trash" and "illegitimate." Ms. Allison's characters are vibrant and alive, especially the young girl, Bone, who poignantly tells the tale of her tormented youth. For all its literary worth, this is not a book that I would have read on my own. The story is deeply disturbing, not only in its content but in the underlying hopelessness of tone. One feels an overwhelming instinct to cradle Bone in one's arms to protect her from her frustrated, jealous, and emotionally disturbed stepfather and from her mother's senseless abandonment. Bone's reactions of burning anger, festering hatred, and perverted fantasies, along with her resultant self image, compound the hopelessness of her young life. Salvation and vindication can only be acquired through her love of gospel music...and although she's told repeatedly that she can't sing, her heart yearns and pleads to God for the gift of song. But the gift of salvation through Jesus that God freely offers is never accepted, and only Bone knows why. Instead of salvation, Bone finds a haven in the home of her lesbian aunt, Raylene. While Raylene is a compassionate, strong, and loving woman, the reader is left with the impression at the conclusion of the story that Bone struggles with her experiences for the rest of her life. Perhaps the quote by James Baldwin at the beginning of the book says it best: "People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead." In the end, no matter what injustices we face in this life, we all will have to answer for how we choose to live our lives. We can choose to be defeated, or we can choose to overcome. Bone's true vindication remains irretrievably in her hands.
Rating:
Summary: Southern Women Alive and Well
Review: Allison has created complex, unforgettable characters in the Boatwright women in the style of Faulkner. Bone Boatwright, a young southern girl with grit and determination was born to poverty and stigmatized with illegitimacy. She takes strength and solace in the family that the rest of Greenville, South Carolina, calls white trash. It's a family in which the men never really grow up but the women grow old, and in which for the most part the children raise themselves under the collective, almost communal eye of assorted aunts, uncles, older siblings and cousins. Bone and her Aunt Raylene reflect a unique combination of dark tragedy, chin-jutting pride, and determination to survive. Aunt Raylene shares with her favorite niece the folly of declaring ultimatums ("Don't ever force a woman to choose between her lover and her child"). Seeking unconditional love and acceptance, Bone gets it, though not from the person she needs it from most. I LOVED this book. The female characters are etched in my memory forever.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: Suprisingly poignant in its narrative of otherwise depressing material. In the hands of a lessor writer it would take a tone too dark to embrace, but here the words captivate, educate, and ultimately inspire. A particularly moving piece of work in the tradition of My Fractured Life, Nightmares Echo, and A Child Called It.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, Heart-Wrenching and Unforgettable
Review: This is a vivid story of a young girl's struggle with life. Her life, as dealt a bad poker hand, is not easy.Bone (a childhood nickname) is the narrator of the book and one of the aspects that makes this story so special. To explore the mind of a child who endures so much... physical, emotional and sexual abuse... brings to an adult's eyes sensitivity that is a necesssity in dealing with children. Reading this book makes me love my daughter even more. This book made me feel grateful that my daughter is protected and loved. It is a rich and searing novel. The Boatwright family; a large, southern clan with more sisters than I could keep track of and more brothers who were boozing, gun slinging heathens who guarded their clan like a junkyard dog would of it's trashy territory, kept me going whilst taking in the main theme. The central story was of Bone who is the illegitimate daughter of the youngest Boatwright daughter, and who is vicitmized my her disturbed, immature, sick step-father, "Daddy" Glenn. Bone's mother watches with closed eyes unwilling to accept what is happening to her daughter. I haven't read a novel in a long time in which the last 10 pages kept my heart thumping and hurting.
Rating:
Summary: Important read
Review: Tough, gritty, and depressing, Allison portrays the hopelessness and pain in the life of an abused "white trash" young girl.
Rating:
Summary: The Love and Pain of a Child
Review: This novel was an exellent novel, it was stunning but also hurtful to see how a loving little child could have so love but also so much pain. It was just a marvoulous book and i really enjoyed reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: voyeuristic and cheap
Review: How can anyone have such a sick mind as tu publish a book that is so awfully voyeuristic, so cheeply depressing? Why is the American public so thrilled to hear about horror, detress and above all - this is what one reads about by every other novel written by a female author these days - child abuse? Why are all these readers so impressed by a book so unsubtle that you just know there must be more complexity than this. The author has picked and searched the most awful details, brought the story to such a climax of sadness that I was left empty, with no feeling but embarrassment at having not put the book down before the end.
Rating:
Summary: In agreement
Review: A reviewer, Rita Dawson, In agreement with the prior reviewer. this is a very well written book that speaks to the heart. Not for the faint of heart. But a book that every genre should read and understand. also agree with Nightmares Echo by Katlyn stewart.
Rating:
Summary: the strength of Bone
Review: Greenville County, South Carolina is a quiet southern town, home to black walnut trees with "knotty roots [that rise] out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Greenville County is also home to Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed Bone shortly after birth, a character with just as many scars as those walnut trees. In Bone, Dorothy Allison has created a character that is all at once strong and weak, heartbreaking and joyful, needy and independent, and overall a survivor. In Bone, she has created a character that is not soon forgotten in the mind or in the heart, and written a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale that just may break the reader's heart.
Our journey with Bone in 1950's South Carolina introduces us to not only Bone but to the whole Boatwright family. Her mother Anney, only 15 years old when she gives birth, Anney's three brothers and two sisters, and Anney's parents, about which her brother Earle said "our mama's a rattlesnake and our daddy was a son of a gun." The stifling hot summers are spent on family porches where Bone would breathe in her Granny's scent "like the steam off soup," drink sweet tea, listen to stories and watch the dust stirred up by kids and dogs running wild just like the adults they have to look up to. Dorothy Allison brings to life a family scarred by poverty in which the women picked up endlessly after the men and seemed to begin aging immediately after birth, and the men never seemed to age despite their cracked teeth, stints in jail and hard drinking.
Bone enters this story labeled a bastard, "certified [so] by the state of South Carolina," her illegitimate status permanently stamped in red at the bottom of her birth certificate. This is something her mother tirelessly tries to have removed and bothers her to no end, hating the negative connotation of "trash" that goes with it. Bone's life gets no easier after her mother remarries at age 21. Bone finds herself with a new father, and then in the position of first fending off and then succumbing to incestuous advances and beatings from her new 'Daddy Glen', who has "the kind of love [for Anney that] eats a man up." Thus begins Bone's struggle against Daddy Glen to keep her mother's love and attention, despite his best efforts to beat her self-worth into oblivion and have Anney all to himself. The depiction of these hardships is something that Allison peppers with the grit and reality of her own hard scrabble life, herself being an incest survivor, an illegitimate child, and being born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina.
Bone stumbles through life with the idea that "this body, like my aunts' bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away,"and Bone's experiences with Daddy Glen only reinforce this idea of worthlessness. These aunts that she looks up to end up being her saving grace as Bone is sent to stay with one aunt, and then another, finding refuge and strength in the knowledge and life experience that each one shares with her. Despite her anger, her hunger to be loved and appreciated is so painfully evident that it breaks your heart to hear her Daddy Glen tell her "that woman [Anney] loves you more than I can understand." That this character lives through the final beating and rape and escapes from someone so intent on destroying her, then loses her mother, her home, and at 12 years old accepts that she is "already who I was going to be," is a testament to the strength and resilience of human beings and the power of family to help us make it out alive.
Rating:
Summary: Age-old tragedy
Review: In many ways, Bone's experience with child abuse represents the prototypical case. She is abused by an older male relative (here, her stepfather). Although there are multiple children in the family, she is her abuser's only victim. The abuser was abused himself as a child and suffers from self loathing. The mother turns a blind eye to the abuse and also suffers from self-hatred. Yet this book is so richly narrated and characterized that it is anything but typical or standard. The description of the Carolina communities the Boatrights inhabit, the diner at which Anney works, the multiple shacks that the family lives in are so tightly drawn that the reader feels that she inhabits them. The characters are complex and diverse, especially that of Bone and Anney. The ending, while heartbreaking, is also probably realistic, and much better than one possible alternative: Bone returns to Anney and Glen for more abuse. That scenario is much more likely than yet another possible scenario: Anney, Bone and Reese create their own home and Glen simply exits the picture. Many of these reviews judge Anney harshly, and in many ways rightfully so. However, I found her character to be both pathetic and sympathetic. Here is a woman without education, skills, or money, who has grown up in a culture of tolerating men's bad behavior. True, she should have removed her daughter from such a dreadful situation, but in many ways she lacked the resources to do so. Her only asset was a tight-knit family that failed to teach her that life without Glen was a real possibility. This novel is dreary, tragic, and will make your stomach turn. Yet I found myself enjoying it just the same. This is both an indictment of child abuse and a sympathetic portrayal of the lives of the poor and uneducated throughout America, especially women.
|
