The Bookmaker's Daughter: A Memory Unbound

The author offers a memoir of her Arkansas childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, examining her difficult relationship with her father--a gentleman bandit who passed on to his daughter his love of language and books

Abbott's father, Alfred, a "gentleman bandit" from Hot Springs, Ark., taught her that books were more important than boys, that she should "stand on her feet and depend on no man." Painting himself as an adventurer caught in misfortune's web, her bookmaker father, whose life revolved around horses, pool and gambling, ensnared her in his private mythologies and prevented her from attending Radcliffe (Texas State was closer to home). This luminous, touching memoir of coming-of-age in the South during the 1940s and '50s is both an exorcism and an act of love. Abbott ( Womenfolks: Growing up Down South ) deftly evokes a halcyon Southern town awakening to political corruption, changing sexual and social mores. Her book sings with fierce love for the flawed patriarch with whom she finally comes to terms. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Abbott (Womenfolks, 1982) comes to terms with her father's complex legacy to her in a memoir that's beautifully written but as quiet and slow as a summer afternoon in a small southern town. The author grew up in the 1940's in Hot Springs, Ark., a town openly and cheerfully corrupt, with rigged elections, a thriving race-track gambling business, and a general harmony born of everyone knowing their place. Her father, Hat Abbott, was a dapper, complicated man, a bookmaker of the gambling sort. But he could have been a bookmaker of the literary sort, his daughter believes: Books were his religion; with a missionary zeal, he read his little daughter Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and let her browse in his set of Casanova's memoirs--anything to arouse in her the same compulsion for the printed word he felt. Then, after WW II, everything changed: The old bunch of politicians was ousted by reformers who closed down the gambling business and put Hat out of work. With romantic ideas about becoming a gentleman farmer, he bought some land and animals and began a steady decline into poverty and despair. The civil-rights movement hit Arkansas, to Shirley's approval and Hat's scornful perplexity; the old landmarks were gradually razed to make room for the malls and Piggly Wigglys of the New South. Bright Shirley got a scholarship to college and fled Hot Springs at the earliest chance, bound for New York, steeling herself against her father's entreaties not to abandon him. Years after his death, she reflects upon the tragically wasted brilliance of Hat, who taught her two valuable lessons: to love literature, and to rely on no man for security and fulfillment. A richly detailed look at a changing world, focused through a poignant father/daughter relationship. Little overt drama here, only seismic changes in the mind and heart. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Guaranteed success by being chosen as a BOMC alternate, this book is destined for even more recognition. It is a sure bet that sections will be anthologized as models of good writing. In addition, like her previous Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South ( LJ 2/1/83), this book will likely grace reading lists of women's studies classes nationwide. The book deserves every bit of this attention. Written with an almost painful integrity, Abbott's memoir deals primarily with her relationship with her father, an illicit bookmaker, but as she recounts her growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, she touches on other equally absorbing and important topics, from the love of literature she learned from her father to her fearless decision to enroll in college when her peers were all becoming mothers. Highly recommended.
- Dorothy Golden, Georgia Southern Univ., Statesboro
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.