Bastard Out of Carolina

This is an awesome book. I love to read and at this point, I have read so much - I am a hard to please reader. The prose is simple, yet it will grab and hold your attention. In fact, before I comment on the story, let me say that if you are an aspiring writer - this is a good book to read just to see what simple, yet very engaging prose looks like. I don't care what kind of writer you are, if you have to communicate anything to anyone in "words," you will benefit from reading this. The story is told from the perspective of a child, but as an adult (and this is definitely adult reading), you won't be able to put it down. There are summaries that I won't rehash, but let me say this - one thing I can't shake is that throughout the book, I wanted to occasionally question Bone's mother about her choices. I found myself wishing that she had made different decisions - especially the decisions that hurt her children and caused her embarrassment. There are also a few racial references in here that some will find disturbing - but it was a reality of the time period in which this book is set. If you are looking for a book to make you smile or laugh, this is not it. But one motif that I did find encouraging was that of family. Throughout, Bone's extended family is a strong one - despite the hardships they face and the disagreements they have. Unfortunately, the love of her family couldn't protect her from everything. Although this is about a poor, white, southern family, there's something in the story that brings to mind one of my favorite books,"The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison. I mention that to say, if you like Toni Morrison, I think you'll enjoy this book. Toni Morrison's prose is quite a bit more complex, but the sad feeling you get when reading about Toni Morrison's characters is similar to the feeling I get when reading about Bone and her family. Bastard Out of Carolina also shares similar themes with "The Bluest Eye" - sexual abuse, the feeling of living life as one of the seemingly "undesirables" (white trash, black, etc.), tragedy, family and no happy endings.

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

Yowtch! This searing quasi-autobiography dressed up as fiction is worth every painful moment it takes to get through it. The book's title says a lot: it's the story of the childhood of a "white trash bastard" and her battles against physical and sexual abuse. I wonder: was this the first book that inaugurated the era of so many memoirs about childhood abuse that Oprah eventually elevated to mythic levels?Bastard out of Carolina is a scarey story with memorable characters who will haunt readers nearly as thoroughly as they haunted Bone, the child protagonist: the violent ones, the jealous ones, the just plain weird ones, the inexplicable ones...This is not a book with a happy ending. One gets the sense that the end of the story hasn't been written - possibly because the author hasn't lived it yet.Outstanding. Worth 6 stars.

Having grown up in the south myself I saw the stigmas portrayed in Allison's book to be true. It is hard to express to people who were not in this environment what it was like, but Allison has done this in her book. Basterd out of Carolina is an excellent book in that it tells the story of "Bone" Boatwright, and her life as poor white trash in the south. Bone's speech patterns in telling the story are so clear and easy to read that it adds to the books authenticity and to it's believability. She tells about her mother's struggle to remove the illigitimate label from her birth cirtificate, and how this affected her life. Bone had to fight to prove herself to the world around her. She didn't want to be the bastard people called her, she didn't want to have people control her through their labels. Included in this struggle is the story of overcoming the abuse she receives from "Daddy Glen" her step father. He beats her and molests her, under the guise that she asked for it. It is only through the help of her uncles and her aunts that she is able to rise above the abuse, and the abandonment from her mother and become the person she wants to be. The book is partly autobiographical on the part of Allison, and she has used her own experiences to tell a powerful story of strength. I reccomend this book to people who enjoyed books by Fannie Flagg, and anyone who has had to deal with abuse and/or abandonment