Crazy in Alabama

For once, an author has taken me to places I've never been and has set me up to turn me upside down in the closing pages. There is NOTHING in this story that can be clearly anticipated. Justice does a crazy (and hilarious) turnabout; racism in people in high places is not carefully put away in a neat package to satisfy the transparent do-gooders in our midst. For all his awesome way with humor, Childress takes his reader on a sustained rollercoaster ride into the depths of the integration conundrum which is still very much alive in this country and the heights to which the smallest of us can go.

Your homework for tonight: Drop everything and read Crazy in Alabama! This is such a great book -- much better than the movie. Mark Childress's carefully drawn characters come alive in these pages. Aunt Lucille will amaze you will all the nutty things she does. And Peejoe's story will have your heart breaking.It all starts when Aunt Lucille and her six children come ambling up the driveway of her mother's house early May 1965. She's killed her bullying husband and stashed his head in a Tupperware bowl (with a Press-and-Lock seal that really works!), and now with him out of the way, she's free to pursue her dream: to become an actress. Leaving her children with her mother, Lucille has zoomed off to Hollywood, evoking suspicion and evading arrest at every turn.Twisted into this story is another tale told through the eyes of 12-year-old Peejoe. He and his brother, Wiley, spend the summer in Industry, Alabama with Lucille's brother, Uncle Dove. As the county coroner and local funeral director, Dove has quite a busy summer ahead of him -- when Industry opens up their new "whites only" municipal swimming pool and the entire town takes a tragic turn.Crazy in Alabama is both riotous and rollicking as well as a sad reminder of the Civil Rights Movement and its history. Lucille's adventures will have readers laughing out loud as suppressed feelings awaken in her on her journey across the country. And the view through the innocent eyes of Peejoe will have readers wondering why all life's answers can't be so simple. An action-packed novel and one that won't be forgotten! Has all the qualities of a quirky southern tale that will amuse you and move you.

A reviewer cited on the back cover of this novel calls it "a combination of Thelma and Louise and To Kill a Mockingbird, and that's about right. Beginning in 1965 in the tiny town of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, a single explosive event scatters the characters and sends the story in two directions at once. Twelve-year-old Peejoe (short for Peter Joseph) and his brother are sent to live with their Uncle Dove, a mortician in nearby Industry, while their Aunt Lucille takes off for Hollywood, chasing her dream of landing a starring role on "The Beverly Hillbillies". While Peejoe witnesses both sides of the civil rights movement, right in his own backyard, Lucille seeks the freedom she never had as a frustrated housewife. As the two stories alternately diverge and intertwine, often hilariously, Childress still manages to present an important social commentary.

'Crazy in Alabama' is one of those unique novels that comes along every once in awhile, and just makes you grin and shake your head in amusement. The book focuses around 2 characters, Peejoe, and his unique aunt Lucille. Lucille, frustrated with the boring life she's leading, decides to run off to Hollywood to become a movie star, and there's only one thing stopping her: her abusive husband Chester. So she puts rat poison in his coffee, and decides to take his head along as a keepsake. Meanwhile, Peejoe, usurped from his grandma's house by Lucille's brats, is in the middle of a race war with his brother and Uncle Dove, all the while worrying about Lucille and what will happen if she's caught. 'Crazy in Alabama' is one-of-a-kind, showing us the ugly side of the South, and just how far people will really go to get what they want.

Mark has a talent for writing prose that is simultaneoulsy thought-provoking and hysterically funny; his world is both authentic and bizzare. He is a master at capturing the experience of youth -- the combination of innocence and growing awareness that we all experienced in some form or another, and his narrative voice is so strong that you'll easily go along for the ride, forgetting you're laughing because one of the women carries around her husband's head in tupperware, or that the people you care about so much are only fabricated characters in a book. This is a highly enjoyable novel that weaves together the story of a woman chasing her dream of stardom with the story of a young boy growing up in the South during the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Besides being a great read, it raises thought provoking questions about how we have treated and continue to treat each other.