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A Southern Girl (2014)

by John Warley(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1611173914 (ISBN13: 9781611173918)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

University of South Carolina Press

review 1: For an unmarried poor young woman in Korea, the orphanage represents an opportunity to give her much-beloved new baby a chance at a better life, one unmarred by poverty and lifelong manual labor and suffering at the hand of the patriarchy. For Elizabeth Carter, the orphanage represents the chance to adopt the daughter she and her husband want and the chance to fulfill a long-time dream of breaking boundaries and contributing to the socioemotional welfare of the world at large. For Coleman Carter and his parents, the orphanage represents a terrifying and unnecessary break with their traditional, moneyed, racist, Charleston society roots. But Soo Yun, the infant, and Elizabeth prevail, and the Carters end up bringing home a beautiful Korean baby girl who they name Allie. And... more everyone's world is better for it, though there are still many battles to fight, starting with Elizabeth's cancer and ending with the largest part of the book, Coleman's battle against an old-money Charleston secret society (to which his family has belonged for a couple hundred years) for his adopted daughter's right to attend her first ball there and become a member of the society.There were parts of this book I really liked. I enjoyed the first chapters that took place in Korea with the young mother and Soo Yun/Allie as a baby and Hana the orphanage nurse very much. The overall plot was good, and the writing was decent. However, large swaths of the book felt overindulgent, the author's precious passages that he just had to include that were not essential to the story. This book was published by a university press, so I'm not entirely sure how heavily edited it was, but I feel it could have been edited much more. I would have cut out at least a quarter of this book - there are many, many examples of anecdotes and even characters that are just not necessary to the story, that bog the reader down in details that go nowhere. There were also a few instances of malapropisms or typos or something that just got under my skin, like using "caddy" where the author meant "catty". It is definitely an interesting book, a different kind of Southern novel than I've ever read before, and had the story been tighter, I think I would have liked it more. Instead, I started off really liking it and then meandered into average feelings as the book wandered all over the place.
review 2: I feel sort of bad giving this only 2 stars. I really wanted to LOVE this book, but I didn't.The author is a lawyer, and it reminded me of papers from a lawyer. Lots of unnecessary words! It started out really well, I enjoyed the story immensely. But then when it was just Coleman, it seemed to drag on forever. I just wanted it to be done.Learning about the culture and the exclusivity of the south was interesting, but is it really all that steeped in tradition as the author said? I don't know. I have never been in the southern states. The characters were likable, and I thought the author did an excellent job in making them believable. The story line was interesting, I just wish there would have been more on the visit to South Korea. less

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