Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood

Susan Allen Toth first appeared on my radar screen with her three volumes of travel essays on England (My Love Affair with England: A Traveler's Memoir, England for All Seasons, England as You Like It). She's a soul mate. In BLOOMING, penned in the late 70s, Ms. Toth shares coming-of-age memories as delightful as those from another of my favorite authors, Laura Shaine Cunningham (Sleeping Arrangements, A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY). Susan was born in 1940, and BLOOMING is her account of life in Ames, Iowa until she went East to college in 1957. The ability to relate will increase to the degree that the reader's background shares commonality with the following: maturing in the late 40s and 50s, living in a Midwest plains state, being female. I can only claim identity with the first, but that limited coincidence didn't affect my ability to thoroughly enjoy this volume. Toth's remarkable memory of her childhood and teenage years could serve as the source for Norman Rockwell paintings as she remembers swimming pools, boyfriends, girlfriends, science classes, the public library, parties, summer jobs, the traditional holidays, and yearly trips to the Minnesota lake where relatives owned a cabin. She was unusually reticent about her immediate family. We learn only that her father died when she was in the third grade, and she and her sister were raised by their mother, a teacher. This absence of familial information is somewhat disappointing as it's perhaps a gold mine of stories not told. For instance, Susan writes about her sister, one year older: "My sister and I, who fought most of the time, declared an unspoken truce on Christmas morning and hugged awkwardly as we exchanged gifts. For those brief moments, we really wanted to please each other." So, what did they fight over? Boys? Clothes? Maternal attention? The realist might point out that most of the world's children, and many in America, didn't live formative years as idyllic as depicted in BLOOMING. True enough. But I lived the male version in Southern California, and Toth's was sufficiently similar in rhythm to remind me of those Good Ol' Days when I didn't know how good I had it. Thank you, Susan.

Once I began reading this great book, it was hard to take a break for even mealtimes. When I was growing up here in Ohio during the 1950s, it was quite a bit like in the author's story. Not perfect, but a very good life!

It's a refreshing Step Back In Time reading. Difficult to believe such an era ever existed. Today's readers will learn a lot about how to live a simpler, equally enjoyable life.

A superbly written book. Here in Omaha, our many neighborhoods were like a dozen Ames, Iowa towns. It's history now, but at least we can re-experience some of the pleasant memories by reading this story.

This is the most interesting book I have ever read about growing up in the Nifty Fifties. Nothing can compare to that era, even though I am younger. Times since then have been terribly stressful in this nation. It's a joy to re-read the book, and drift back to peacefulness. Gosh, the author is age 60 this year of 2000 ! Time flies by too fast. Ames, Iowa has been blessed to remain a smaller city, and has a great past.