Between, Georgia - Hardcover

Jackson, Joshilyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446524425 ISBN 13: 9780446524421

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

DESCRIPTION: Nonny Frett understands the meaning of the phrase "in between a rock and a hard place" better than any woman alive. She's got two mothers, "one deaf-blind and the other four baby steps from flat crazy." She's got two men: a husband who's easing out the back door; and a best friend, who's laying siege to her heart in her front yard. And she has two families: the Fretts, who stole her and raised her right; and the Crabtrees, who lost her and won't forget how they were done wrong. Now, in Between, Georgia, population 90, a feud that began the night Nonny was born is escalating, and a random act of violence is about to ignite a stash of family secrets. Ironically, it might be just what the town needs...if only Nonny weren't stuck in between.

About this title

About the Author

AUTHORBIO: JOSHILYN JACKSON lives with her husband and children outside of Atlanta, where she is currently at work on her next novel.

Reviews

There's "no such thing as a town smaller than Between," Joshilyn Jackson writes about the setting of her new Southern novel. It's not awfully far from Athens, Ga.; it's surrounded by pines and threatened by kudzu. Its major attraction is a museum devoted to porcelain dolls and butterfly farming: "a must-stop spot for the kind of people who liked to pack up a camper and go see freakishly large balls of tinfoil."

Between is also the home of the Fretts and the Crabtrees, who are like the Montagues and the Capulets, only more eccentric. The Fretts are "meticulous to the point of mental illness," Jackson writes. If they ever cuss, they use only cuss-words that appear in the Bible. They have money; they create order. The Crabtrees, meanwhile, live in squalor and chaos, sloping in and out of common-law unions and borderline felonies. The primal Crabtree landscape is a helter-skelter vision of "rusted-out bodies of cars and partial cars, heaps of old lawn mowers, fridges, gas stoves, and chunks of various engines." Crabtree men don't ask for dessert; they holler, "Baby Jesus, but I [expletive] need some pie."

A faithful summary of Between, Georgia would have to go on for pages to honor its enormous cast of quirky characters and its breathlessly intricate plot. But what you need to know is that the narrator, a spirited young woman named Nonny, was born a Crabtree and raised as a Frett. Her adoptive mother and aunts, in their tidy print dresses and orthopedic shoes, are naturally at odds with her Crabtree grandmother and a slew of redneck Crabtree cousins. But an attack by a vicious Crabtree dog brings the families together and sets the action going.

There's also Nonny's husband, Jonno, physically irresistible and ethically deficient, from whom she'll be divorced as soon as they can stop having "goodbye sex" and get to their court date in Athens. Jonno plays in a rock band called X. Machina -- as in deus ex machina, an ancient Greek plot-resolving device that comes in handy when this book reaches full gallop.

Jackson, whose first novel was gods in Alabama, has a gift for juggling a zillion movable parts. Adept at the kind of farce that requires characters to hide from each other in the bushes, she's also good at poignancy and at darker scenes of mayhem. There's so much back-story that it takes the reader a while to get oriented, but once you've got it straight, Jackson produces an astringently humorous performance.

Though Between hasn't the emotional depth that occasionally enriched gods in Alabama, it's equally dotted with Southern "characters." A favorite: the airhead virago Amber DeClue. Please let Scarlett Johansson play her if there's a movie so she can deliver the line: "I have to go iron my hair."

Reviewed by Frances Taliaferro
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The biological daughter of poor, scared teenager Hazel Crabtree, Nonny Frett was left at birth with the wealthy, respectable Frett clan—a secret that doesn't keep long in a rural Georgia town of 90 people. Growing up at the center of a Crabtree-Frett feud begun by her birth, Nonny is caught between her biological family and her adopted one, between contempt for her philandering husband and the comfort of marriage, between an apartment in Athens, Ga., and her childhood home, Between. When a Doberman belonging to Nonny's biological grandmother Ona Crabtree attacks Nonny's adopted mom, deaf and blind Stacia Frett, and Stacia's twin sister, Genny, the families' dormant "war" awakens. Though Jackson (Gods in Alabama) might cut a few corners plotwise, her strengths more than make up for it: plenty of Southern sass ("Don't call me again unless you are personally on fire") and rueful, charming confidences ("I wanted the divorce with all my heart. I did. Only I wasn't sure I wanted it tomorrow") make this a theatrical and well-paced Southern family drama. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Jackson returns with a second quirky and touching novel abut the South. The story of a feud between two families from opposite sides of the tracks, it narrowly avoids the worst cliches and appropriately exploits the more interesting ones. Jackson has been compared to Fannie Flagg, and rightfully so; her characters are vivid and lovable, put in situations that are so hard to explain that it's just easier to pass the book lovingly along to a friend. In Between, Georgia, protagonist Nonny is the adopted child of the Frett family, a strong-willed, well-off, and women-run clan, but she is the biological child of the criminal and downtrodden Crabtree family. Her adoptive mother, Stacia, is blind and deaf, and Nonny falls into a career in ASL interpretation. To escape her hometown of only 91 residents, where everyone knows the story of her lineage, Nonny runs to nearby Athens and lives out a half marriage with a rock guitarist. Predictably, the strange and dramatic goings-on in Between draw her home over and over again, especially when her cousin leaves a baby daughter there for the family to raise without her. Nonny falls in love with young Fisher, and the cycle of untraditional mother-daughter pairings continues. A climactic ending with perfect story resolution makes this book tidy and uplifting, and even the most cynical reader will surely smile as the back cover closes. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446524425
• ISBN 13: 9780446524421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304