Member of the Wedding
This is a coming of age story about Frankie Adams, a twelve year old girl who lives in a small Southern town with her widowed father. Frankie spends most of her time with Berenice Sadie Brown who is the black cook for the family and her six year old cousin John Henry West. They are usually in the kitchen talking about whatever comes to mind.
Frankie is at that age where she is not sure who she is, she changes her name to F. Jasmine during the story, or where she is going. Early in the story her brother Jarvis decides to marry his fiancee Janice and invites Frankie to the wedding. Frankie decides that she will become part of their family and live with them after the wedding. She only tells a few people and Jarvis and Janice are not included.
The rest of the plot is how her plan for a happily ever after threesome works out. Using this story as a backdrop the author does an excellent job of following the meanderings of a twelve year old girl in a small town. Frankie has some very interesting conversations with Bernice about Bernice's three husbands. Bernice tries to impart some adult wisdom to Frankie but more often than not the child in Frankie rejects it. When dealing with John Henry it is Frankie who tries to appear the adult and is often outdone by John Henry's childish wisdom. All of the dialogue between these three is excellent and it gave me the feeling that I spent some time sitting in that kitchen.
There is an incident where a sailor tries to treat Frankie like an adult and ends up with a big bump on the head.
In the end reality is imposed on Frankie and she learns that she has to accept it. She turns thirteen and moves on a little older and wiser. This is not the type of story I would expect to enjoy but the author's writing skill helped me get to know and like Frankie and her friends. It stirred some of my memories from being young and living in a small town in the South. More than anything the author portrays the gamut of emotions and the silliness and pain of the bumpy road of growing up. ( )

Review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter:

An absolutely devastating novel, a compelling account of an entire community's dark night of the soul, and the deaf-mute man who holds them back from going over the brink. I was interested to learn after finishing the book that McCullers and her husband were both bisexual and primarily sought relationships with their own sex; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is filled with descriptions of straight people who are in a very real sense queer. Biff Brannon is the most striking of these portrayals.

McCullers is said to have described her work as "a search for God"; Lonely Hunter is so tragic precisely because her characters fail to find anything answering that description. The whole thing is so well executed, so true to life, that it is impossible to do anything but absorb the book in awe. Arthur Miller was wrong to dismiss McCullers as "a minor author"—it is a wonderful thing that she is now being rediscovered. ( )