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bjr2022's review
4.0
A slow, meandering Southern sharecropping family’s life in the 1930s, this lightly fictionalized autobiography (per the author’s daughter’s front-of-book note), is a book full of flavor and period content (rather than tight fictional plot). It’s sweet and sad and harsh and nostalgic. It hurt, yet I enjoyed it.
Borden Deal’s daughter, Ashley Deal Moss, who declares flat-out that her father is Boy Sword, the twelve-year-old narrator in this book, also says to readers: “Perhaps an understanding of your family or parents and heritage will ring true as this novel rang true for me.”
A particularly timely comment for me, reading the book in the wake of my dog’s death, and synchronistic with a distant relative sending me a digitized video of home movies of my father’s family from 1926 to 1936. The lives of the Robinsons and the Deals could not be more different, but what they have in common is rich, intense physical family relationships and complicated community dependencies.
There is not a lot of philosophizing in The Least One, but when it comes it's good:
One day a swarm of bees descends on the sharecroppers' homes in Bugscuffle Bottoms and everybody goes nuts trying to get them to land and form a honey-producing hive. Observing this, Boy says:
In my present quiet mood—morose at times—this statement says it all. I do not understand this life process at all: what we’re doing, why we try so hard, and what the point is. But I know this mood will pass and eventually, once again, I’ll look at someone and see pure life force and, as forgetful as the bees, I’ll fall as in love as Deal was and my father’s massive family were when they had no idea of the disasters and mindless dying-off that were to come.
I apologize if this review brought you down. For a more uplifting one, check out Diane Barnes’s.
Borden Deal’s daughter, Ashley Deal Moss, who declares flat-out that her father is Boy Sword, the twelve-year-old narrator in this book, also says to readers: “Perhaps an understanding of your family or parents and heritage will ring true as this novel rang true for me.”
A particularly timely comment for me, reading the book in the wake of my dog’s death, and synchronistic with a distant relative sending me a digitized video of home movies of my father’s family from 1926 to 1936. The lives of the Robinsons and the Deals could not be more different, but what they have in common is rich, intense physical family relationships and complicated community dependencies.
There is not a lot of philosophizing in The Least One, but when it comes it's good:
One day a swarm of bees descends on the sharecroppers' homes in Bugscuffle Bottoms and everybody goes nuts trying to get them to land and form a honey-producing hive. Observing this, Boy says:
We whirled in and around ourselves, too, our own little world. If we’d had a queen bee, Bugscuffle Bottoms would have been exactly like that swarm of wild bees, trying to get closer and closer and dying off and not paying any attention to the dying because living was more important. (271)
In my present quiet mood—morose at times—this statement says it all. I do not understand this life process at all: what we’re doing, why we try so hard, and what the point is. But I know this mood will pass and eventually, once again, I’ll look at someone and see pure life force and, as forgetful as the bees, I’ll fall as in love as Deal was and my father’s massive family were when they had no idea of the disasters and mindless dying-off that were to come.
I apologize if this review brought you down. For a more uplifting one, check out Diane Barnes’s.
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