Our Quiet Growing Time

A long long time ago in a little Polish village, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, there lived a girl so beautiful that she was called Anielica, because her face was that of an angel's. And there also lived a boy who was called the Pigeon, because his nose was as beaked and ugly as the bird's. The Angel was as kind as she was beautiful and the Pigeon, while not handsome, was smart and resourceful, confident and brave. In order to stand out from the scores of suitors who sought Anielica's hand, the Pigeon told her father that he would renovate their family home for free. Over the next months, the Pigeon became a fixture in Anielica's family, crafting furniture and cabinetry with his hands, befriending her brother, and slowly and sweetly finding a way into Anielica's heart. The love story of the Angel and the Pigeon is juxtaposed with the story of their granddaughter who, decades later, moves from the village to the big city of Krakow. Krakow is bustling with the free...

1. I love her name. 2. I love the title. 3. I love this cover. 4. I did not love this book. I was reading this on my lunch break the other day and someone I work with said, "Flannery O'Connor... now that's some Southern craziness." And that's exactly what this collection of short stories is... Southern craziness. I don't generally read non-fiction or short stories for the same reason. They don't typically hold my interest because it's hard to feel an emotional attachment to cold hard facts or characters that will disappear in 27 pages. But these stories were well crafted, and if I didn't like the morbidity of the stories, at least that made them suspenseful and interesting: Who's gonna die in this one? I hastily tacked a "2 out of 5 stars" rating on goodreads, but then I reconsidered my rating. Flannery's stories are all about family tension, race, faith, and class issues in the South in the tumultuous era of the 1950...

From Pat Conroy to one of Conroy's literary influences: Thomas Wolfe. And maybe this was a bad move on my part. I can see the same pomposity (I looked it up this time. It is a word; pompousness is also correct) in Wolfe's writing that I disliked in Conroy's. They say writers live in Mississippi because of Faulkner; they live in Asheville because of Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel is a huge autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in Western North Carolina in the beginning of the 20th century. Wolfe's editor was the famed Maxwell Perkins, the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. So why have the works of F. Scottie and Ernie entered the American literary canon, but old Tommy's books haven't? Apparently Wolfe was incredibly successful in his time, both critically and with the public. But that popularity hasn't lasted. I hadn't really heard about him until I read the inside cover of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn recently. Betty Smith said she ...