The Orange Blossom Special

Although not the deepest book I have ever read, this is still a very good one. The only qualm I had about it was that I feel some of the characters (in fact, most of them) were either undeveloped or under-developed...the author skipped years in the lives of these people, years that I would have wanted to read about. Still, it is at times funny, at times sad, but always interesting, and you certainly walk away truly caring about the characters.

"The Orange Blossom Special" is an unaffected and endearing story that spans several decades from the 50s to the late 80s. It concerns a quirky but sweet recent widow, Tess, who is sinking into the bottle after the death of her beloved husband Jerry when she realizes that to save her life and the life of her teenaged daughter Dinah, she has to make a big change in their circumstances. So on a whim, she moves them to Gainesville, Florida, and there starts a whole new existence. Except for the fact that she communes with her dead husband through notes in a cigar box, and that Dinah communes with him through "finger signals" from a disabled boy in class, they are both perfectly normal. Sort of. Enter the spoiled ex-cheerleader wife and mother Victoria, whose entire life revolves around her hair, fingernails and decorating her ornate Florida mansion, and her long-suffering family, which includes a daughter who becomes unlikely friends with Dinah, and the book picks up. We follow our characters through the innocence of the 50s, the Civil Rights disturbances (in which Victoria's housekeeper Ella, and Victoria's son Charley become heroically entertwined), the Vietnam War, the excess of the 80s and beyond...and they stay, if not changed by life's circumstances, at least for all intents and purposes the sweet people they are. A charming book; highly recommended.

Tessie and Dinah Lockhart move to Gainesville, Florida in 1958 to get away from the sad memories in Carbondale, Illinois. Jerry Lockhart, Tessie's husband, and Dinah's father died almost three years ago. Dinah joins a new school mid-year. She is able to become best friends with Crystal Landy. The story takes through the years as the Landys and the Lockharts grow up. Charlie Landy, Crystal's brother has many special gifts to give to the community. He falls in love with Dinah. Crystal and Dinah grow apart over the years but family and love bring them back together. Her mother Victoria is an unpredictable character, and tends to cause a great amount of anxiety to those around her. Tessie is able to fall in love even though Jerry is still a part of her life. This novel provides us with a unique glimpse of life in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.

Betsy Carter's The Orange Blossom Special is so well-stocked with characters, events and tangible energy that it's hard to believe it's less than 300 pages long. Set in Florida, mostly during the 50's and 60's, the book follows the intertwined lives of a couple of teenage girls, their friends and families. Carter gets all the details right. Her senses of place and time are pitch perfect, from her description of the toniest beauty parlor in town to her evocation of a sultry Florida night. She knows what teenagers of the day wore and worried about, and she knows what their mothers cooked and worried about. Humane, funny and beautifully written, this book is so full of life it breathes. Highly recommended.

As I reached page 250 of "The Orange Blossom Special," I started feeling depressed, not because the story is sad, but because I knew that I would soon have to bid farewell to Betsy Carter's cast of uncommonly endearing characters. By the end of the book, they seem like your old friends, and I'm still thinking about them several weeks after forcing myself to turn the last page. But giving these folks original, leap-off-the-page personalities is not Carter's only skill. In her debut novel, she takes us to a mid-twentieth-century Florida that is so far from the sophisticated, fast-moving Gotham of her earlier offspring, the much-mourned monthly New York Woman, that you actually feel sweaty and unhurried as you're reading it. But Carter the fiction writer still has the same crackling wit, fabulous eye for detail and enormous compassion for the human condition that made her magazine such a winner and her memoir, "Nothing To Fall Back On," so appealing. The 1950s and 60s are vividly evoked here through the language and attitudes of the characters, historical and cultural events and references (Vietnam, Anita Bryant, even Davey Crockett) and all those great songs....In fact, the only way the book could be improved would be to have it include a soundtrack CD!