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| I really liked this short novel...I think mainly because it really captures how it feels to be an awkward 12 year old girl. I loved LOVED LOVED the character of Berenice (the black woman who talks to Frankie--aka F. Jasmine throughout---she was just...it.) It also really really GETS the mood/setting/etc of a Southern evening in ways I could not even really put a finger on. I'm not even sure that made sense...but there you go... Favorite Quotes from The Member of The Wedding "Oh Jesus! The world is certainy a sudden place" (14). "Have you ever seen any people that afterward you remembered more like a feeling than a picture" (27)? "The poor old soul passed on this morning. They're taking the body to the family graveyard in Opelika" (71). **This jumped out at me because MY family graveyard is in Opelika, and um, there's a spot for me reserved there. Creepy, eh? "It was the time of afternoon when the bars of sunlight crossed the back yard like the bars of a bright strange jail" (75). "You know Lily Mae Jenkins?" F. Jasmine thought a minute, and then answered, "I'm not sure." "Well, you either know him or you don't know him. He prisses around with a pink satin blouse and one arm akimbo. Now this Lily Mae fell in love with a man named Juney Jones. A man, mind you. And Lily Mae turned into a girl. He changed his nature and his sex and turned into a girl" (76). "Sometimes I wish I had never knew Ludie at all," said Bernice. "It spoils you too much. It leave you too lonesome afterward. When you walk home in the evening on the way from work, it makes a little lonesome quinch come in you. And you take up with too many sorry men to try to get over the feeling" (88). "F. Jasmine put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes, but it was not death. She could feel the heat from the stove and smell the dinner. She could feel a rumble in her stomach and the beating of her heart. And the dead feel nothing, hear nothing, and see nothing; only black"(89). "Now the shape of this boy ahead of me was so similar to Ludie through the shoulders and the back of the head that I almost dropped dead on the sidewalk. I followed and run behind him. It was Henry Johnson, and that was the first time I ever saw him...but he had chanced to buy Ludie's coat and he was built on the same shape as Ludie. And from the back view it looked like he was Ludie's ghost or Ludie's twin. But how I married him I don't exactly know, for to begin with it was clear that he did not have his share of sense. But you let a boy hang around and you get fond of him. Anyway, that's how I married Henry Johnson" (100). "Why, don't you see what I was doing?" asked Berenice. "I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces. My intention was to repeat me and Ludie. Now don't you see?" (101) "F. Jasmine did not know why she cried, but the reason she named was the crew-cut and the fact that her elbows were so rusty"(116) |
| I haven't seen the movie version, but I think I need to rent it. |