Title: Remember Whose Little Girl You Are
Author: Ellen Nichols
Year published: 2022
Category: Adult nonfiction (memoir)
Pages: 128 pages
Rating: 3.5 to 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2022 Google Reading map): USA (AL and FL)
Summary: Remember Whose Little Girl You Are captures the flavor of the Deep South like no author since Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor. Ellen Nichols captures the tenor of small-town Southern life in the fifties and sixties, with its vicissitudes and hilarity. One is captured with her openness and drawn deeply into the dialogue-so much as to, according to one reader, sometimes feel guilty of spying.
Read it and see if you want those times back-or are just relieved they're gone.
Review: I thought this book sounded like it might be interesting with a peek into the life of a preacher's daughter in the south. That's what it is, but the novel is also not what I expected. I do want to give props for the marketing of this book. It came with a pair of socks that match the book cover! How cute is that?! Even though I am not sure what the significance of the socks are, I am happy to have them. 🤣
The author certainly captures life in the southern US states in the 1950s and 1960s. The tensions between the races, the role of women, and moving around a lot as her father was transferred by the Methodist Church all figure large in her storytelling. And she is a good storyteller, bringing the reader into her life from the first page. The book is short at only 128 pages and has 27 brief chapters, each of which is a vignette from her life.
A number of these chapters are named after the towns she lived in and each one gives a glimpse into life in a small town, what it was like to be new, how she found her way and the impact each town had on her. I liked these chapters. I think where this book falls a bit flat for me is that the other chapters ends up being a series of stories about the young men that she dated. There is nothing salacious or rude in these descriptions, in fact, it's all quite chaste and getting to know her beaus gives the reader further insight into the times and place. I just don't think that I wanted to know all about her dating life.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Literary Escapes--Alabama
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