Ohio

Teddy Rose chose Sula by Toni Morrison for her Ohio read.

At its center Sula is about a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel — both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town — meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin, and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything — perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime — until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour.

Sula leaps an invisible line and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks — where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance. Toni Morrison evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.

Ohio

Framed said, "Lynne also suggested The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan for Ohio. It's about a woman who supports her ten children in the fifties and sixties by entering contests. The comments on Amazon were very positive. I've added it to my list and even bookmooched it."

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Evelyn's winning ways defied the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to raising her six sons and four daughters. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. The story of this irrepressible woman, whose clever entries are worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will always triumph over poverty.

Ohio

Framed said, "Lynne @ http://lynneslittlecorner.blogspot.com/ added "And the Ladies of the Club" by Helen Hooven Santmyer for Ohio. Ladies is a great book but big. It's an epic starting in the late 1800's, I think."

"...And Ladies of the Club" centers on the members of a book club and their struggles to understand themselves, each other, and the tumultuous world they live in.

Yikes! Yes, it IS long ... at 1184 pages! I think the author sounds interesting: "Helen Hooven Santmyer was born in 1895 and lived in Xenia, Ohio. In addition to her career as a writer, she worked as an English professor, a dean of women, and a librarian." But I wish the publisher had told me more about the book. A reviewer named Stan (a man, no less) had this to say: "The book is the story of a fictional medium-sized town in southern Ohio, from just after the Civil War to the beginning of the Depression. The story is told primarily through the eyes of a women's book club, and focuses particularly on two of the club's members and their families. All the important themes of life are explored: love, race, jealousy, religion, war, politics, business, literature, education, family relationships, and death. If you read this book, you will be both moved to tears and richly educated in American history. How much more can you ask of one book?"

Ohio

NOLADawn said, "... and one from the North :) ... OH- The Bluest Eye- by Toni Morrison ... This is fun :)"

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.