tangleroot_eli's review
2.0
How I wanted to love this book. After all, I may never again get to say, "This is a book with a picture of me on the cover." Alas, it is not to be. In a couple stories, particularly "Last Exit to Darlington," goldberg (like e.e. cummings, she eschewed capitalization) seems to want to inherit Flannery O'Connor's "Southern Gothic" mantle. But O'Connor created complex, multi-dimensional characters that readers could care about. goldberg's characters are infinite repetitions of themselves: the same tired clichés, the same worn tropes over and over.
Female characters fit into one of two molds: sex-crazed viragos trying to seem younger, better, and more glamorous than they are to get laid; and mousy push-overs. Men are "lucky" enough to come in three flavors: brutes, wimps, and sex toys.
Also, the terrible sentence structure, punctuation (the foreword claims that goldberg "disdained the formality of punctuation"), and spelling (characters' names are spelled two and even three different ways in the course of one story) make it an aggravating read.
Queen of the Country is obviously a labor of love, a memorial to goldberg created by her friends and family after her death from cancer in 2005. But her friends and family may be the only people it's meant for.
Female characters fit into one of two molds: sex-crazed viragos trying to seem younger, better, and more glamorous than they are to get laid; and mousy push-overs. Men are "lucky" enough to come in three flavors: brutes, wimps, and sex toys.
Also, the terrible sentence structure, punctuation (the foreword claims that goldberg "disdained the formality of punctuation"), and spelling (characters' names are spelled two and even three different ways in the course of one story) make it an aggravating read.
Queen of the Country is obviously a labor of love, a memorial to goldberg created by her friends and family after her death from cancer in 2005. But her friends and family may be the only people it's meant for.
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