Have you watched "My Louisiana Sky"? The memorable film directed by Adam Arkin and with the perfect cast of Juliette Lewis as Dorie Kay, Kelsey Keel as Tiger Ann Parker, Shirley Knight as Jewel and Amelia Campbell as Corrina.
"My Louisiana Sky" is a beautiful and wonderful story well told by an equally beautiful and wonderful soul Kimberly Willis Holt. The Film also captured the pathos of the sensitivity of the novelist who succeeded in capturing the heart and soul of humanity in this classic novel.
Read the book and watch the film and you will never be bored of even repeating it again and again.
Tiger Ann Parker wants nothing more than to get out of the rural town of Saitter, Louisiana--far away from her mentally disabled mother, her "slow" father who can't read an electric bill, and her classmates who taunt her. So when Aunt Dorie Kay asks Tiger to sp the summer with her in Baton Rouge, Tiger can't wait to go. But before she leaves, the sudden revelation of a dark family secret prompts Tiger to make a decision that will ultimately change her life.
Set in the South in the late 1950s, this ter coming-of-age novel explores a twelve-year-old girl's struggle to accept her grandmother's death, her mentally deficient parents, and the changing world around her. It is a novel filled with beautiful language and unforgettable characters, and the importance of family and home.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
The daughter of a Navy chief, Kimberly Willis Holt lived all over the world during her childhood. But Forest Hill, Louisiana, became the place she called home. "Forest Hill is the kind of town where neighbors care when you're sick and show up at your door with chicken and dumplings. I wanted Tiger to be from a place like that," says the author. She currently lives in Amarillo, Texas, with her family. This is her first novel for young readers. Her second novel, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, won the National Book Award and will be published in paperback by Random House Children's Books in the spring of 2001.
Born
Pensacola, Florida (during a hurricane)
Currently lives
Amarillo, Texas
Previous jobs
Directing radio news, marketing, and decorating
Hobbies
Reading and going to the movies and theater
Inspiration for writing
Memories from childhood
Favorite books
To Kill a Mockingbird and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets
by Jude Morgan
The romantic poets as soap opera stars
A Review by Yvonne Zipp
The Romantic poets -- Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley -- bear more than a passing resemblance to modern celebrities (and not just due to some scandalous behavior): Every aspect of their lives has been so picked over that writing about them can seem as stale as a month-old Enquirer.
British writer Jude Morgan overcomes this difficulty handily in his absorbing new book, Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets.
Instead of the head-on approach, Morgan instead explores the lives of four of the women who loved the poets (Byron, of course, gets more than his fair share): the high-strung Lady Caroline Lamb, who has an affair with Byron; sparkling Fanny Brawne, who was engaged to Keats before his untimely death; generous, sunny Augusta Leigh, half-sister and lover of Byron; and Mary Shelley, Percy's teen bride and author of Frankenstein.
Morgan opens with the attempted suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft, protofeminist and author. And Wollstonecraft, with her radical idealism and defiance of society, serves as matriarch to all, not just her famous daughter. After Wollstonecraft dies as a result of childbirth, the novel catalogs the childhood of the four women.
Some readers may find the early pages slow (Bring on Bryon!), but the wealth of detail and Morgan's amazing ability to re-create what these women might have thought and felt are worth savoring. The novel is meticulously researched, but scholarship never outweighs storytelling.
Morgan uses a variety of narrative techniques to fit the mood of the tale, from first-person accounts where the character speaks directly to the reader to sections that read like scenes from a play. With Byron's wife, Annabella Milbanke (of whose sanctimony the poet quips, "She would make Cromwell look like a backsliding voluptuary"), he borrows Jane Austen's acerbic quill: "In all there was about her a quality of quiet self-containment that could not fail to elicit admiration, even where it did not inspire affection." (There is an even more obvious homage to Austen later, when Annabella notes, "[S]he must admit it as a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man not in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.")
After the poets make their grand entrance, the novel encompasses enough love affairs and tragedy for a dozen bodice-rippers, without ever losing its clear-eyed intelligence. Mary's story is particularly heartbreaking.
The men might have the fame, but they never quite come to life in the same way as the women, particularly Augusta and Mary. Shelley, despite his espousal of free love, somehow seems a prig. Byron and Keats get plenty of clever witticisms (a running gag has both men making fun of Wordsworth) but sometimes their genius feels stated rather than observed.
But these are minor quibbles. For lovers of literature, Passion more than lives up to its title.
Yvonne Zipp is a freelance writer in Kalamazoo, Mich.
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