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caseythecanadianlesbrarian's review against another edition
4.0
Marnie Woodrow’s 2002 novel Spelling Mississippi begins with an extraordinary event: Cleo, a Canadian in her late twenties visiting New Orleans, witnesses a striking older woman jump headfirst into Mississippi river in the middle of the night, wearing full evening dress including a tiara and high heels. Cleo, assuming the dive is a suicide, is momentarily stunned and then runs panicked from the scene. This initial encounter between Cleo, a traveller in search of meaning and belonging, and Madeline, the diving diva who it turns out is not suicidal but seeking the exhilaration of danger, is the catalyst for a moving love story. Although at first terrified to face the consequences of what she saw, Cleo becomes obsessed with the mysterious midnight swimmer once she discovers that the woman is still alive...
See the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/a-tale-of-eccentric-love-and-self-discovery-in-new-orleans-a-review-of-marnie-woodrows-spelling-mississippi/
See the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/a-tale-of-eccentric-love-and-self-discovery-in-new-orleans-a-review-of-marnie-woodrows-spelling-mississippi/
katie_king's review against another edition
2.0
The whole book seems like a prelude to the real story...which we only get to imagine.
"First novel by an acclaimed short-story writer", eh? That might explain the slow start and the meandering story line so far. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about these characters. Unfortunately the two-dimensional characters are all the reader has to work with, as the plot is pretty thin.
As the pages piled up, I got weary of having the author plot-tease us by having her two protagonists repeatedly cross paths while she refers to a map of the French Quarter for reference. Woodrow seems reticent to engage with the sexual attraction between the women in this book and that makes it difficult to take their obsession seriously. I'd enjoy it more if it was written as comedy or as a short-story in which the women "meet cute" in NOLA. Or, even better, if the entire book was condensed into the prologue to the eventual reunion (only hinted at here) and relationship that they build up over the years that follow. But relationships are hard work, and so is novel-writing.
I couldn't truly enjoy or identify with the quirky-cutesy characters and the ridiculously contrived coincidences that drive the plot. Why would an absent father show up after twenty years and be so concerned with his daughter's welfare? Why would her parents even be in communication with each other if their divorce was so fractious? And the reveal, near the end of the book, about Cleo's mother's demise was just too much of a downer for these lightweight players to carry.
Glaring Error Department: The angels are in the mud of Florence, but the devil's in the details. A good editor would have let the author know that a child conceived in 1966 would not have been three years old in 1973.
"First novel by an acclaimed short-story writer", eh? That might explain the slow start and the meandering story line so far. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about these characters. Unfortunately the two-dimensional characters are all the reader has to work with, as the plot is pretty thin.
As the pages piled up, I got weary of having the author plot-tease us by having her two protagonists repeatedly cross paths while she refers to a map of the French Quarter for reference. Woodrow seems reticent to engage with the sexual attraction between the women in this book and that makes it difficult to take their obsession seriously. I'd enjoy it more if it was written as comedy or as a short-story in which the women "meet cute" in NOLA. Or, even better, if the entire book was condensed into the prologue to the eventual reunion (only hinted at here) and relationship that they build up over the years that follow. But relationships are hard work, and so is novel-writing.
I couldn't truly enjoy or identify with the quirky-cutesy characters and the ridiculously contrived coincidences that drive the plot. Why would an absent father show up after twenty years and be so concerned with his daughter's welfare? Why would her parents even be in communication with each other if their divorce was so fractious? And the reveal, near the end of the book, about Cleo's mother's demise was just too much of a downer for these lightweight players to carry.
Glaring Error Department: The angels are in the mud of Florence, but the devil's in the details. A good editor would have let the author know that a child conceived in 1966 would not have been three years old in 1973.
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