Opposable Thumbs

After reading this, first I began to manifest images--of stories past read-of one of my favorite writers Flannery O'Connor. The book entitled Opposable Thumbs is a collection of short stories that vary from topics of growing up in the rural areas of south experiencing, for the reader definitely fulfilling, the southern cultures' dynamic images full of sexism and racism; One also experiences a middle class women struggling with lost loved ones and her devastating-to herself and mostly to her family-desire to hold on to the past. As I began the reading I was struck by the detail and colloquial language that sends me at warp speed, perhaps faster if that's possible, to the 1960's or various times all depending when the stories take place. I am then left peering as a reader into the lives of people in the south through the eyes of omniscient narrators entering in and out of the characters lives adapting perfectly to the characters voices. I definitely recommend this book for it is very colorful and brow-deep in detail. The detail ranges with images that will make the reader feel pleasant and content to images that might strike the reader as offensive and disgusting but the images are never the less right-on realistic and just for the time and place the story is supposed to take place-one image that comes to mind occurs in the namesake 1st story in the book when the father of Leo Tolbert Victor Tolbert is seen having sex with the only woman prisoner around that also happens to be disfigured due to trying to set her husband on fire.

Hudson seems to be close to mastering what most writers hope to: showing something that has been shown before in an original, interesting way. She takes you deep into the dark corners of Southern life and shows you just how much color, how much character, is hidden there. Her characters are real--any flaws that they have or anything about them that gets under your skin does this because they are have come to life. She seems to have made characters that most of us only wonder what it would be like to know. But Hudson knows them, well, and shows not only how they think, how they approach the world, and why they are how they are, she reminds us that they are people, and makes us feel something for them, no matter how much they may have disturbed us. She shows things that are disturbing- rape, racial bigotry, incest, and looks these issues right in the eye. Because she does, so do we. Her book is honest. It doesn't hide from the way the world is and the things that the world has in it, and no matter how much we don't want to see them, after we have we are glad we did. "Opposable Thumbs," like life, is both hilarious and sickening, disturbing and comforting, familiar and different, all at once. The stories all have characters that need to understand life as much as we do: children trying to fill their days and understand segregation, widowed chuch-women lusting, thirty-something drunks trying to relive high school, women trying to understand the disappearance of their youth and the shapes of their bodies, to name only a few. Hudson has shown us, through her characters, that sometimes you've got to look closely as those you think are so different to understand how similar we all really are.

From the first sentence of the first story of Suzanne Hudson's collection "Opposable Thumbs," the reader is thrust deep into the South and all it encompasses, both good and bad. She takes her readers along the dusty dirt roads of Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, examining issues as complex and personal as religion, segregation, and parenthood in addition to issues as entertaining as extramarital affairs and the past glory of grown up good ol' boys. It is rare to find a writer who can so expertly capture the voice of both a child being raised in a Southern aristocratic home and a "white trash" child being raised by a drunk behind the local feed store. Even more amazing is the seemingly accurate way she handles her first hand narrations as an old black woman in the segregated South. Hudson is also able to move as fluidly through the past and the present as she is through social classes; in her story "Chilling Out," she tells the story of a young boy with pierced ears and orange hair who is having trouble relating to his father and third stepmother, yet in both "Opposable Thumbs" and "Mixon, Fla. 1966" Hudson tells the story of young girls dealing with growing up in a changing world. Regardless of what subject Hudson is handling and from what persona she is using to view it, the reader feels that they are able to trust Hudson's portrayal of it. The beauty of Hudson's work lies not only in it's artful rendering of her characters and their problems, but also in the masterful way she weaves the details in her stories, from dialect, to setting, to the names and nicknames of her characters. As someone who has spent almost every summer of their life in the shimmering heat and humidity of Central Mississippi, I am able to truly say that Hudson has captured the feel and aura of the South in a way that is beautiful in its brutal and unapologetic honesty.

Excellent read! Once I started reading this book I could not put it down. Suzanne Hudson has captured the true feeling of being a Southerner.

Hudson's tales will ring true to any Deep South native who came of age in the 50's and 60's. She takes the reader down those lush, often dark roads with clarity and lyrical style. And she offers up heaping bowls of banana pudding in the form of big old hoots along the way. Never one to find much to laugh about in the tore-up trials of those decades down here, I busted out laughing at Hudson's bullseye humor that fit perfectly between the bouts of misery she so skillfully portrays. I suspect folks will be hearing a lot about this one in the weeks and months ahead.