This book is very very Southern, vague, Faulkneresque, and inaccessible. But I really liked it. The South's dark weirdness that can exist without even being questioned is brilliantly captured. My husband and I disagree about the meaning of the ending, but I won't spoil it. I found it horrific, while my husband found it hopeful. So you'll have to decide for youself. I recommend this book, but take your time and re-read when you're lost or you will miss things that are critical to the plot. ( )

Slow but enjoyable book about a chidl that looses his mother and goes to stay with his father only to find that his new family is dysfunctional. His father is bed bound and barely communicates and his uncle is disinhibited and grasping. His father has remarried an odd woman and his only friends are a tomboy and the eccentric black housekeeper. ( )

Interesting but a little hard to follow. It is the story of a child searching for belonging and finding himself in a household full of strange happenings and even stranger people. Truman Capote holds the reader's attention but at times the story just seems a convoluted twist of events that don't quite make sense, but then maybe that it what it is supposed to be! ( )

Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) begins with a pre-teen boy arriving to move in with the father he never knew, hoping to avoid going to military school. In a sense it's the same premise as Ricky Schroeder's 1980's sitcom Silver Spoons. Unfortunately for Joel, the young protagonist of this novel, he does not find his father to be an affable man-child who drives a train around his mansion. In fact, Joel does not find his father at all until more than halfway through the novel, Mr. Samson being mysteriously hidden at his own home at Skully's Landing.

Instead, Joel becomes acquainted with the eccentric cast of Southern Gothic figures who live on and around Skully's Landing. There's his grouchy step-mother Amy, odd-ball cousin Randolph, a maid named Zoo Fever who helps Joel settle in but dreams of running away, and the tomboy Idabel who becomes Joel's only friend. Unable to escape from Skully's Landing, Joel escapes further into his mind (the "other room") as the only way to keep above the nuttiness around him. When he finally meets his father, well lets just say it's not very pleasant either and they don't end up playing Pac-Man together.

There's not so much of a plot in this novel, just more of vignettes of Joel's daily life as he sinks more into the morass of Skully's Landing. Capote's prose is beautiful, if just plain weird and full of the grotesque. It's kind of reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird in tone but lacking the hope and wonder of that novel. Here the discoveries that come with growing older are not edifying but demoralizing. ( )

Gripping characters and setting - but mired moral tone. ( )