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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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English 45C
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 264
Started: 29 March 2024
Finished: 1 April 2024
Summary:
Janie Woods walks back into her hometown on a sunny summer afternoon, starting a wave of gossip through the town. When her bosom friend Pheoby is sent to ask her what, precisely, happened to her (much-younger) husband, Janie begins to tell Pheoby her story. Starting when she was a teenager, married off by her aging grandmother to a strange older man, Janie describes her life with three different husbands, a life perpetually and at times tragically impacted by external factors--but a story that she has the agency to tell herself
Thoughts:
I was enthralled by the writing of this book. The circular narration, and the framing of a novel narrated by the protagonist after the fact, makes for a uniquely immersive book, and the use of different linguistic registers (an AAVE dialect for dialogue; plainer English for the description of events) adds a depth and warmth to the story that was incredible. Janie was also a really good character, lightly realistic and complex while also being extremely calm and competent for how much in her life was not up to her. The way she acted, and described her actions after the fact, had a sort of competence to it that was amazing. The book also appealed several times to the reader's sense of justice; without elaborating a ton on unfairness, points of unfairness in the novel (Tea Cake stealing Janie's 200 dollars, the dog bite for example) were extremely impactful.
I'm very glad to be reading this for an English class. Although I'm still not sold on the novel being a bildungsroman, since Janie is calmly and maturely narrating her story from the perspective of a mature person who has lived through the whole experience already, it's a fascinating book and I'm quite excited to think about it more.