Ro Grandee is going to kill her husband. If she doesn't, he will surely kill her first. After living with a father that beat her, she has married a man equally, if not more, abusive. All it took was a fateful meeting with a tarot-reading gypsy in the airport, and Ro is finally ready to get herself out of her violent life. She begins to channel her younger, stronger self, Rose Mae, and sets out to get some closure and safety.I am such a fan of Jackson's books. They are deep family dramas, rich with southern atmosphere and heavy emotions. Taking the character of Jim Beverly from Gods in Alabama (in my opinion, also a 5 star book!) and writing an entirely new story from another point of view was quite a trip. I enjoy it when authors choose to revisit a town and it's characters, as it feels like there was more to tell- that the story wasn't quite done yet.
I liked that Jackson slipped into southern dialect where it was relevant. Dialect can sometimes be terribly distracting, but it this case it was used to really flesh out the characters of Rose Mae's father and high school friends, to show the reader what her younger life was like. The writing was very powerful, often taking my breath away with it's stark honesty. It is hard to make something like domestic violence beautiful to read, but Jackson took Rose Mae's emotions and made them into something tangible that the reader can identify with and swallow. It may have been a hard book to stomach at times (especially the scenes with abuse), but I would read it all over again in a heartbeat.
Overall Rating: 5 Stars
No comments:
Post a Comment