The Watermelon King

Rating:
Summary: King of Storytelling
Review: As a Southerner and lover of Southern literature, I especially enjoy books that celebrate the art of storytelling. Anyone who has read Big Fish can tell you that Daniel Wallace is a master storyteller, and The Watermelon King proves it. I can't wait for the next one!

Rating:
Summary: Dark and Mythic
Review: Ever since seeing the film, BIG FISH, I've made it a point to try to read all of Daniel Wallace's books and he's certainly become one of my favorite authors.

BIG FISH was poignant and bittersweet. THE WATERMELON KING is, I think, far darker, but just as good as BIG FISH. LIKE BIG FISH, THE WATERMELON KING is set in Ashland, Alabama, once known for producing the biggest, sweetest, juiciest watermelons in the world.

Ashland celebrated (and ensured) its outstanding success with watermelons with a yearly Watermelon Festival in which both a king and a queen were crowned. The queen, of course, as anyone familiar with pagan fertility rites will know, had, by far, the easier of the two jobs.

Things changed in Ashland when Lucy Rider arrived in town. Although pretty, Lucy's claim to fame was the ability to make a terrific sandwich. Lucy loved Ashland and the inhabitants of Ashland loved her back. At least most of them did.

Despite Lucy's love for Ashland, she's a city girl, born and bred, so when Watermelon Festival time rolls around, Lucy not only fails to understand it, she interferes with it with disastrous consequences and Ashland's watermelons are never again the same.

Flash forward twenty years as another Rider arrives in Ashland. This time it's a young male, Tom Rider, who comes looking for the mother he never knew. The residents of Ashland welcome Tom Rider into their lives, but not in any way Tom Rider would have expected.

THE WATERMELON KING is a wonderful book and, just as in BIG FISH, myth and legend are woven throughout the narrative. THE WATERMELON KING, however, is less intimate than is BIG FISH and far darker (it's almost Southern Gothic). It's still a book, however, that showcases Daniel Wallace's unique talent to its fullest and one I would recommend highly to a general readership. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: a major misstep
Review: Having read Wallace's other material, I think it would be best if he stopped writing about Ashland completely. The characters in this book are just too simple to have any believability to them. The first part of this book is well-written and Wallace always has a knack for some great imagery. Nonetheless, this book just did not involve me like his others.

Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: I enjoyed THE WATERMELON KING a lot. I enjoyed the way it kept happening on its own peculiar terms. My expectation as a reader is to encounter characters who are drawn according to a predictable and, at least for the purposes of fiction, a malleable psychology--in other words, characters who are in the business of not being themselves, or of not knowing what a self is. Of course Shakespeare didn't write this way, or Faulkner. Wallace's characters, too, are grandly or mythically motivated--not parsed out the way modern people like to think of themselves. These characters are what they are and they do the thing they are. They don't play at growth. It's quite nice to be taken into this pre-therapeutic and unsophisticated universe -- a fabulous universe if you will -- and be told a story about love, fertility, and the way we thrive on the story itself--the telling of the story, the passing on of the story, and ultimately, the tragedy of the story. WATERMELON KING is a work that sticks around.

Rating:
Summary: Better than BIG FISH
Review: I read Wallace's first novel BIG FISH and liked it a lot -- it's really funny and totally knocks you out emotionally in the end -- so I moved onto this one, which is set in the same town and deals with similar themes.

I say similar and not the same because Wallace has clearly grown as a writer; he has a magical way of telling a story that has you guessing what really happened all the way through. THE WATERMELON KING was even more strange than BIG FISH, and I loved it. I haven't read such an original writer in a long time. it's as if a southerner was channeling Garcia Marquez or something -- indescribable, but fantastic in every sense of the word.

Rating:
Summary: Impossible to put down
Review: I've read Daniel Wallace's last two books, and I think The Watermelon King is his best, even better than Big Fish, which I heard was being made into a movie by Tim Burton. The Watermelon King takes stock Southern characters-- the village idiot, the old man with stories-- and turns them on their heads by making them the heroes. Daniel Wallace's writing is always funny and sad at the same time, and in this book, it's also pretty absorbing and much more risky. I highly recommend this book to people who like something a little different, funny, and moving.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid!
Review: This book is simply delightful. It doesn't leave you hanging on the edge of your seat, but it keeps you entralled. It's a pretty fast read, and when you put it down, you can't help but say to yourself, "Wow." A great thing about this book is that Daniel Wallace gives you the pieces to the puzzle that is Thomas Rider's life, but he doesn't quite fit them all together for you. This book has an all-over warm, feel to it, kind of like a lazy summer day. (Which is a perfect time to read it! ;D)

Rating:
Summary: Baby Tubbs says Yes!
Review: With Watermelon King, Wallace builds on Big Fish and Ray in Reverse by writing what is the most cohesive novel of the trio. Publisher's Weekly called it a "slight mistep," I call that a "slight misread." Come on. He's at his best here, combining the best of that staitforward storytelling seen in O'Conner, the strong regional construction of Faulkner, and the magical realism of Marquez. Unlike, say... Rushdie, Wallace avoids using magical realism in an apish, overwhelming way, but rather puts it in service of the story. He takes it over the top just enough. This book pushes the limits of genre, avoiding the perimeters of most of the bland treacle that we submit our eyes to. You oughta read it. Great book.