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▾Member reviews

English (39) Vietnamese (1) All languages (40)

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Showing 1-5 of 39 (next | show all)

I love this book so I decided to listen to it again on yet another drive to a dog show. It was just as good the second time around, like visiting with old friends. In eight years time, one forgets a lot of the details while remembering the important parts. I highly recommend this one if you have not already indulged. (

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kblinn | Nov 23, 2009 |

Ave Maria Mulligan is the town pharmacist in Big Stone Gap, VA. When her mother dies, she leaves a letter telling her big secret, which changes everything Ave Maria always knew about herself. This is a fun little story of life in the mountains, with all the attendant personalities. Sometimes Ave Maria acts stupidly, but she realizes it eventually, and of course there's a happy ending. This was a good book to read when I found myself in need of a little fluff. (

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tloeffler | Oct 27, 2009 |

Cute story. Cute setting. Cute characters. Cute writing. Cute cute cute.
This was a feel-good book that touched on some tough, real-life issues but mostly made for a wonderful light read.
What I love the most: there are two more books in the series and I'm off to hunt for them! (

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InsatiableB | Oct 14, 2009 |

There is nothing better to me than a good, southern novel. This one fits the bill. Set in Big Stone Gap, VA, it tells the story of Ave Maria, the self-proclaimed "Town Spinster", who runs the pharmacy in town and is grieving the recent loss of her mother. Her world takes a sharp turn when she learns that the man she knew as her father, who didn't quite live up to his responsibilities, was never her real father after all. Once Ave finds her real dad, and subsequently "finds herself", all the pieces of her life seem to fall into place. (

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Blakelyn | Oct 6, 2009 |

I adored this book. Ave Maria, the protagonist, was a very complicated woman faced with difficult choices. I enjoyed watching her grow as she made life-changing decisions. The eccentric characters were very real - their eccentricities brought depth to the story. And the romance was refreshingly unpredictable. (

)

ccwaring | Sep 10, 2009 |

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Showing 1-5 of 39 (next | show all)

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▾Common Knowledge

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Series (with order)

Big Stone Gap (book 1)

Canonical Title

Big Stone Gap

Original publication date

People/Characters

Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney

Important places

Big Stone Gap, Virginia, USA

Important events

Related movies

Awards and honors

Epigraph

Dedication

For Tim

First words

This will be a good weekend for reading.

Quotations

French movies always have love scenes in the kitchen. Somebody is eating something drippy, like a persimmon, and next thing you know it's a close-up of lips and hands and off go the lights and their clothes, and pretty soon nobody's talking. I check my ceramic fruit bowl on the counter. One black banana. Please don't let this be an omen.

Last words

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

▾LibraryThing members' description

Book description

It's 1978, and Ave Maria Mulligan is the thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed spinster of Big Stone Gap, a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She's also the local pharmacist, the co-captain of the Rescue Squad, and the director of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the town's long-running Outdoor Drama. Ave Maria is content with her life of doing errands and negotiating small details-until she discovers a skeleton in her family's formerly tidy closet that completely unravels her quiet, conventional life. Suddenly, she finds herself juggling two marriage proposals, conducting a no-holds-barred family feud, planning a life-changing journey to the Old Country, and helping her best friend, the high-school band director, design a halftime show to dazzle Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed Hollywood movie star who's coming through town on a campaign stump with her husband, senatorial candidate John Warner.

Filled with big-time eccentrics and small-town shenanigans, Big Stone Gap is a jewel box of original characters, including sexpot Bookmobile librarian Iva Lou Wade; Fleeta Mullins, the chain-smoking pharmacy cashier with a penchant for professional wrestling; the dashing visionary Theodore Tipton; Elmo Gaspar, the snake-handling preacher; Jack MacChesney, a coal-mining bachelor looking for true love; and Pearl Grimes, a shy mountain girl on the verge of a miraculous transformation.

Comic and compassionate, Big Stone Gap is is the story of a woman who thinks life has passed her by, only to learn that the best is yet to come.

▾Book descriptions

Amazon.com (ISBN 0345459202, Mass Market Paperback)

In the town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, not much happens. The highlight of 35-year-old Ave Maria Mulligan's week comes on Friday, with the arrival of the Bookmobile, the sight of which sends her into raptures. Her favorite book concerns the ancient Chinese art of reading faces. Through her face-readings, we come to understand the hostilities simmering within her family: her father whose small eyes are the clear "sign of a deceptive nature." Her aunt who "has a small head and thin lips. (That's a terrible combination.)" Adriana Trigiani's first novel concerns the family scandals that befall Ave Maria in this seemingly uneventful town. Greed, lust, envy--all the ancient emotional elements--manifest themselves even in this hamlet of "ordinary folk." Fans of Fannie Flagg or Rebecca Wells will enjoy this down-home tale, full of small, everyday details and colloquial revelations. The writing is often awkward, but so too are the characters who inhabit this place: the Bookmobile lady who thinks of herself as the sexiest woman alive; the amateur actors in the local Outdoor Drama who bristle with ambition when they hear that Elizabeth Taylor is coming to visit. In Big Stone Gap, her visit is so anticipated, it's like she's an angel sent from heaven. --Ellen Williams

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400)

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