Reviews with content warning for Death - Pane, cose e cappuccino dal fornaio di Elmwood Springs

I have been slowly making my way through Fannie Flagg’s books, since I did my dissertation on her most famous (and most likely, best) novel: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Café. As I have read her books, there have been multiple times where some of the language used was highly insensitive, but it always seemed like Fannie is trying to critique people who genuinely use that type of language. However, after reading Welcome to the World, Baby Girl, I feel she may be simply a conservative, rich, white woman from the south.

There were many times while reading this book that I wondered if sensitivity readers existed in the 1990s??? Because I simply do not understand how this book was published. Flagg does her best (not saying much) to draw attention to social/political issues in the 1940s and bring awareness to them (i.e., Hitler persecuted all minority groups during that time), but she truly does so without any nuance and has her characters speak very insensitively about the subject.

Even beyond how ineffectively she discusses race and race politics, her main character is so frustrating! Honestly, I was not really able to connect to Dena Nordstrom until I realized that she was a side-character from The All-Girls Filling Station. And that is definitely not a quality you want a main character to have.

Also, there were at least a hundred times where Dena explicitly mentions that she never wants to be in a relationship or get married or have children. In the context of the first 85% of the book, Dena truly reads as an aromantic asexual character who is averse to relationships and sex. Come to find out in the last 150 pages, this was just a trauma response because her mom abandoned her ???? Is that really how it works???? It then felt very disingenuous when, in the last TEN PAGES, Dena decided that she DID want a relationship and to get married. TO HER OLD PSYCHIATRIST??? And when they first have sex, it’s because she thinks he looks cute and “child-like” in his BUNNY FEETSIE PAJAMAS??? So not only is Dena not aroace, she’s also kind of predatory because she’s not attracted to him until he is “child-like”??? Gross! (Sidebar: I understand that the intent is for him to not be a sexual threat, therefore Dena feels safe enough to be with him intimately….nevertheless, why describe him as a CHILD before they have SEX?!). So that was another component going against me caring about Dena Nordstrom.

While I usually do enjoy the way that Fannie Flagg tells stories by interweaving the narratives of multiple groups of people from different places and time periods together, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl ultimately falls flat even with this intriguing story structure. I think I actually will take a break from Fannie Flagg now.

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