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Summary: Great but Disturbing Read
Review: This book and the Boatwright family are all in my head! I need to know what happened to Bone & the rest of her clan. Dorothy Allison wrote right to my heart. I appreciate the intensity of this work and her effort. it must have been a harrowing experience to write this story. I am glad I read this book but also wish I'd never met these people. I hate that love makes people do stupid and hurtful things. I never was able to sympathize or empathize with the mother, though. Read this book, you'll look at life differently.
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Summary: Devastatingly depressing but excellent
Review: As a mother, I found the end of this book disturbing and troubling. While I know this is a mirror on reality, dark as it is at times, the mother that she presents, Annie, loves her daughters with all her heart and this is repeated throughout the book. That is why, I believe, the end is so troubling. While it is well written, I have not had a book that brought on such depression as this one, particularly while Bone was in the car, hurt, waiting for her mother to take care of her. If you want to get depressed, read it. If not, stick to something a little lighter.
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Summary: Excellent, yet disturbing coming of age book
Review: This is one of my favorite books. The writing is like poetry, yet at the same time its subject matter is harsh. Allison is a master at bringing the reader right in with her, and experiencing some pretty crummy stuff. The novel is not uplifting, but it is thick and heavy with emotion and suffering.
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Summary: Wrenching
Review: Dorothy Allison is the real deal. I've read a fair bit of her stuff, and while "Cavedweller" and "Two or Three Things I Know For Sure" pale in comparison to the achievement of this novel, I doubt she has ever written a dishonest sentence in her life. From the first page, you believe her, and you trust her. "Bastard" is certainly harrowing, but it's also uplifting without ever being sentimental or mawkish. Allison's characters are often poor, abused, marginalized, and have been stripped of their dignity in some way, but most of her work is fired with a certain gritty optimism and quiet determination within these (often female) characters to reclaim this lost dignity and sense of self. Bone is no exception to this rule, and she's a character so alive and so human she immediately invites you to pour all your sense of identification and empathy into her in a way that the best characters do. The end of this book is absolutely wrenching, and Allison steers clear of pat answers and happy-ever-afters. She exposes the bleakness of childhood, and the powerlessness of children at the hands of often less-than-capable (and sometimes downright corrupt) adults. More than anything, though, I like Dorothy Allison because she makes you believe compassion, intelligence, and storytelling are all parts of the same beast.
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Summary: Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina
Review: I'm an English teacher, and as such I've read many, many books. Allison's work is one of the best-written, as well as most entertaining, gripping, and powerful books I've read. I'm from the South, and I so often read books by "Southern" authors who have no real southern voice. Allison's work has a strong small-town, southern voice. I could relate to many of the things that her characters discussed because I feel like I lived them. Outside the southern voice, the tale of Bone and her relationships with her mother and Daddy Glen are gripping and at times disturbing. This isn't an emotionally easy book to read because of some of the incidents in it, but should good literature really be that easy? I recommend this book enthusiastically, especially to anyone who has lived in a small town in the Southeast.
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Summary: AWESOME book for everyone...
Review: Bastard Out of Carolina was one of those book that I was assigned to read as part of my senior year as an English major. I reluctantly picked up the novel and read the first sentance and was instantly hooked. Something about the way Allison structures her paragraphs hooks the reader right from the start. Not to mention that the main character Bone is completely lovable. When she was (.. well, I don't want to give anything away.. )hurt I felt like I was being hurt... The characters are very well developed, and the story is an unforgettable. I have searched for novels that equal up to this one, but have been unable to find any. So READ THIS BOOK NOW and savor every last word, because there isn't much like it out there!
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Summary: Review from Jaymi
Review: Ruth Ann Boatwright is the name of the young girl that grew up in Greenville county, South Carolina. She was given the nick name ?Bone,? by her family and friends. The author Dorothy Allison, has a way of making her readers believe that this story could really be true. Allison gives a lot of detail to each scenario in the book. For instance, Bone takes a lot of physical and mental abuse from her step father Glen Waddell. Allison also gets very graphic in each scene, making her readers very involved and absorbed in the scene, not wanting to put the book down. Although sometimes very intrigued by her writing, people may also become very anxious while reading this novel because Allison tends to get very detailed on topics that are not very significant to the books purpose. In spite of this, Allison develops so much of Bones emotional baggage and carries the reading to a climatic ending that makes the readers heart pound.
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Summary: Make this book required reading...
Review: I've read this book more than once and it leaves me speechless. Dorothy Allison's nightmarish look at the life of a poor southern girl is stunning. This book is not just about living in poverty, nor is it just about abuse. It starts with those two issues and delves deeper, becoming a case study in human nature and the need to love and be loved. I think it should be required reading for everyone.
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Summary: From your average ninth grader
Review: I have two points to make. The first one is that I think that Bastard out of Carolina should never have left the editors office. It is too long and many of the paragraphs, indeed whole sections should have been taken out or given some sense that it belongs in the book.
My second is that though the last third of the book was packed with emotion, it seems that it is just that: packed with emotion. The first two thirds of this book seem almost devoid of any emotion relevent to the plot.
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Summary: White Trash - The Inside Scoop
Review: Did you ever drive through someplace like Greenville County, South Carolina, and wonder about the lifestyle of those folks sittin' on the dilapidated porch sipping ice tea or Jack Daniel's, to the wail of gospel or hillbilly, while a brood of bare-footed children romp in a yard of dirt so poor it gets welfare checks from the EPA? Well, here's your chance to get The Inside Scoop.Allison guides us through the poverty and failures, stubbornness and pride, anger and hate, ugliness and incest, showing us how these people courageously avoid despair by spitting frequently out the side of the mouth, always away from the wind. It is a powerful story because it is based on the childhood of a girl raised in extreme poverty, in Greenville County, who was born of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and who was frequently beaten and raped by her stepfather. Before reading Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison's first novel, I attacked her second book, Cavedweller, but I had to surrender halfway through. Although the theme in Cavedweller is similar to that in Bastard, Allison over cooked her premise, smothered it in style, and ruined my appetite before serving desert. So, I was delightfully surprised with Bastard's straightforward prose, comprehensible dialogue, and its evolving, eventually suspenseful plot. As the remaining pages diminished, I read faster, dying to know how Allison was going to wrap up Her story. Wow, this one will stay with me for a long time.
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