spoken for

Rating: 8

This was pretty good! This book is actually made up of a collection of short stories. Each story is a lone chapter in the book. Sometimes it is a bit confusing, hard to keep straight who is who and what time period it is as the chapters may overlap each other rather than following one another.

The stories are told in first-person by our main character, Ernestine. She’s growing up in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s in small town Missouri. Her life is pretty much the transition between “the old ways” and the beginnings of American feminism. She’s a young girl fighting to get out of the town, trying to avoid that same-old-same-old life all the other women desire. It’s very interesting, though, to read about the customs and the typical gossip that existed at this time, pre-WWI. The time of my great-great- and great-great-great-grandparents.

I think my favorite chapters of the book were all, pretty much, but the first and the last, haha. The first almost lost me and I kept thinking, oh man, I’m not going to be able to finish this book, but once I got past that, it was great. The end of the last seemed a little long, too, but maybe I was just anxious to finish it and return my borrowed book.

But overall, it’s very entertaining and like a light into the Midwest American past. Very enjoyable!

There is one thing, though, that I totally don’t understand. In a nutshell, Mr. Gifford comes down with Typhoid fever and it looks pretty bleak for him but after something like a week, his fever breaks and he starts to get better. But then, his young wife Lois is feeding him ears of corn. Ernestine exclaims that she knows better, that the doctor said that would kill him, but Lois says she was told nothing of the kind, that Mr. Gifford was hungry and asked for sweet corn. Two and a half days later, he does die. I don’t get this! I’m reading about Typhoid fever right now and all I can figure is… is it because of the intestinal hemorrhage? That would be my guess but I’m no doctor, so if anyone else has an idea, click the contact link and drop me an email.