Between, Georgia

Description

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Jackson's author biography reveals her to be a "former actor," but listeners will guess that for themselves from the first few tracks of this wonderfully realized audiobook. Her brand of Southern fiction was born to be read out loud, with its quirky characters and astute observations about human nature. And Jackson herself is the one to do it; it's clear throughout the narration that she's having a raucous time as raconteur. As she spills forth the story of Nonny, a young Georgia woman caught in the tumble of a feud between her adoptive and biological families, there is palpable energy and sustained warmth. What is especially surprising is how skillfully Jackson manages the large array of divergent character voices, from the calm, matter-of-fact tones of Nonny's adopted mother to the wild redneck sensibility of her biological grandmother. Particularly delicious is Jackson's nasal, braying inflection to portray Nonny's bossy and narrow-minded aunt Bernise. The one place Jackson's dexterity falls short is in the novel's male voices, which sometimes fall flat. Otherwise, this is a delight from start to finish.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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