Bitter Persimmons

by A.S. Friedall
reviewed by Byron Merritt

Like many other people around the world, Mrs. A.S. Friedall has had a rough time growing up. Her mother and father don't accept her for the person she is; she's been married and remarried five times, trying to find acceptance within herself and via her family; and she's moved around Texas so much (because of the aforementioned items, as well as chasing jobs) that she knows the roads better than the lines on her own hands.

Bitter Persimmons starts out with Mrs. Friedall standing on a railway platform as a child, waving goodbye to her father as he leaves for WW II. And this seems to be the highlight of her life. Or just a passing note . . . I'm not too sure. And so, problems began to prop up as I read along, wondering where the author/narrator was going with the story. Come to find out, she goes absolutely nowhere. We never really leave her home state of Texas, and we never establish a viable storyline.

To start out, Mrs. Friedall has serious problems with narrative flow. There really isn't one for the first 70 pages or so (and occasionally even after page 70). On almost every page she jumps from time to time and subject to subject with no rhyme or reason. The book reads like a child's recounting of her diary. I'm sure that was a reference for the author during the writing of this book. And that's what she should've used the diary for. Reference. But it seems that she pulled almost all of her narration for this book from a diary (at least that's how it seemed to this reader).

There's a rule among novelists, too, that Mrs. Friedall is not applying: show, don't tell. She tells the reader everything rather than showing them. I know how she feels, what the room feels like, what her boyfriends/husbands do and how they react because she told me. I know where she was when John Kennedy was shot because she told me. She didn't show me any of these items, thus making the book read like a recounting of places, times and events. Not engaging reading.

Add to this fact that she never tells us (at least within in the first 60 pages she doesn't) the names of any of her prime family members, or even her own name, and you can see why I didn't become involved with any of the characters. Ever. We have to guess what the A.S. on the cover of the book stands for (Alice is her first name, I think, but what the S. stands for I still don't know).

And here's the final nail in the proverbial literary coffin for this book: Mrs. Friedall's life just isn't that interesting. I'm sorry to say something that sounds so mean-spirited, but it's true. I know I would never DREAM of writing about my life and publishing it. I'm not that interesting either. The only thing she wants to get across to the reader is how unfair her parents treated her, and how she seeks acceptance from them at every crossroads in her life. Although this is true of most people, we don't want someone else to tell us about it through weak narration and, what seemed to me at least, whining ("My parents never loved me" or "I chose all the wrong paths and husbands because my parents never loved me" or "I had a baby so that my parents would love and accept me"). This got very, very, very, very tiresome after a short while.

I will say that Mrs. Friedall had an excellent line editor (or editors). Her spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax are all perfect. This may sound like a minor point, but it isn't. With some of the poorly edited material that FWOMP Book Review has received in the past, this was refreshing from that standpoint. But only from that standpoint . . . unfortunately.