Review: Irony at its Finest
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 18, 2014
What an interesting book!  What an aggregation of characters populate this small town of Creekwood, all interconnected in one way or another in ways often unbeknownst to each other.The book starts off with Hester, the teenage daughter of the local pharmacist.  She is enamored of a young man, Bernie, but their romance is interrupted  when WWII starts, and he goes off to war, where he is killed.  Young Hester has a total meltdown, and is put in the local asylum for a short while to recover.  But on their way to visit her one day, her parents are killed in a car accident.Scene II.  We meet Beatrice and Ethyl, daughters of a nasty mean man and his browbeaten wife, fundamentalist religious believers.  Her father is the minister of the congregation.  Fourteen-year-old Ethyl gets pregnant by a young orphan boy, and before the boy learns of this, he steals money from the church and leaves town, never to be heard from again.  Daddy beats the tar out of Ethyl and marries her off to Mr. Stout, forty years old and even meaner, if that's possible, than her father.Two separate families with nothing to do with each other.  Until the grown son of Ethyl, the seed of the long forgotten dalliance,  meets the recluse Hester, and they get married,  and have a daughter.And on and on and on, with the threads growing more tangled, and tighter, until finally, instead of an unravelling at the end, we have a total rat's nest of entanglement.This book should be called The Great Big Book of Irony.  It is filled with the relations, known and unknown, of the characters, and at each revelation, we say to ourselves, "Wow.  How ironic."  Over and over and over again.  Until the end,  where we learn of the final irony.An excellent read, reminding us that when momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.