The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

I wanted to like this book. I love the title, and the story sounded really interesting. It started off well. I liked Calla, I liked her mom, her siblings and her life. I liked the stuff from when she was a kid. I liked Tucker and I liked them as teenagers. As she grew up though I found myself getting bored. It got, I don't know quite how to explain it exactly, but I began to lose interest. I wasn't a huge fan of Sweets, and I didn't so much begin to dislike Calla, but I got annoyed with her. It seemed too long. To dragged out and the characters changed. I wish they had just ended the novel after Calla moved to New Orleans, or graduated from high school, cause I felt that part was strong.

Last week I saw the Broadway opening of playwright Tracy Letts' new show, 'Superior Donuts.' Letts' previous show, 'August: Osage County,' won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and enjoyed a long, successful run on Broadway. So of course, when his new show opened, everyone immediately compared it to his last one, when the two are very different.

I hate this kind of comparison. It irritates me when an author's books or movies or plays are compared to each other in quality (particularly when one has been saturated in praise) rather than critiqued as independent works.

Rebecca Wells' The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder seems to have gotten trapped in this pattern. The success of her previous Ya-Ya novels left high expectations for Crowning show more Glory, the first of her four books to feature new and different characters. The majority of reviews I read expressed disappointment with Wells' new novel, but I really don't understand them and completely disagree.

Calla Lily Ponder is the protagonist of the story, and we follow her life as she transitions from childhood to adulthood in the small town of La Luna, Louisiana. Calla enjoys a blissful childhood, soaking in the compassionate love of her hairdresser mother, M'Dear, and the nurturing light of the Moon Lady--"the feminine force that will guide and protect her throughout her life." Calla's childhood is defined by innocence until she is forced to grow up fast. Hometown heartbreaks lead Calla to New Orleans after high school to take up where M'Dear left off with her "healing hands." Calla enrolls at L'Academie de Beaute de Crescent as a fresh start, determined to develop her skill and passion for soothing pain and changing lives. But of course, New Orleans also brings a whole slew of new friends and a whole slew of new troubles.

This book had me hooked by the second chapter and crying by about the sixth. Wells' writing, as usual, oozes southern charm. She has created another leading character that is defined by her southern upbringing, one that is tied so tightly to her setting that she couldn't exist anywhere else. Family, love, heartbreak...the themes and emotions of the story are universal, but Calla is not. I loved the characters and their depth of emotion at very realistic situations.

Though it takes about four hundred pages to do so, this book is essentially telling you one thing: love, live, dance often, and believe that life (and the people in it) is basically good. So maybe that is more than one thing, but you get the gist. show less

This book could have been titled The Flowering of a Southern Belle. Calla Lily Ponder narrates her history by gathering the sprigs of her life in rural Louisiana from age eight in 1961 until she reaps a nearly improbable ending as a 31-year-old in 1984. Within her two-decade bouquet of budding and blooming into full womanhood, Calla endures parental attachment and loss, adolescent attraction and loss, and marital bliss and loss. But not to worry, no one can nip this flower in the bud.

The Moon Lady, La Luna, serves as an emcee/narrator for the prologue and epilogue to this tale. Meanwhile, many references, reprises and prayers to the moon goddess cultivate the story with a type of spiritual guidance and benevolence. This medium sometimes show more may suggest the naturalistic, Wicca-dance of the quartet we might have met in the Ya Ya Sisterhood. But this charming novel focuses on the La Lunettes, a trio of lifelong BFFs: Calla, Sukey, and Reneé.

“The Crowning Glory” has a Biblical roots: 1 Corinthians 11:14-15 reads: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering.” The verse may explain why Calla keeps her long locks into her 30s. Nevertheless, I prefer Proverbs 16:31: “Gray hair is a crown of splendor; it is attained in the way of righteousness.” Regardless of its germination, The Crowning Glory title serves multiple ironic purposes as a beauty salon brand, tendril references to hair and morality, as well as the gathered splendor Calla’s lifelong achievements.

There are perhaps too many minutiae in cosmetology, its practices and products. Then, too, there is an awful plentitude of food descriptions and clothing details. But that’s a woman writer’s touch, I guess. Verging on the tedious, these details do coronate the rites of passage of a Southern flower who survives the peacenik ‘60s and the free-love ’70s. Colorful depictions of Louisiana life are delightfully picturesque, almost rooting the reader dockside on the La Luna River.

This was extremely pleasurable reading, although the denouement is a distracting weed. So, I think I’ll take my long white hair to the salon for a shampoo and massage from a healing-hands operator who’ll blow away the conclusion’s wrinkle. show less

I read this entire book within 24 hours. I simply could not put it down.

As the daughter of a woman who went to the beauty parlor every week for a "wash and set," reading this book was like stepping back into a different era, a time and place made special by the relationships between the women who connected with one another week after week, talking about their families and their lives.

My mother would head off to the beauty parlor every Friday, the stress of day-to-day life evident in her posture, her attitude and in the frown on her face. But after a couple of hours of female bonding over a cup of hot coffee or a frosty glass of sweet tea and relaxing with her gang of gals, Mama came home with a completely different attitude. She was show more carefree again, the mother that we adored.

I have no doubt that Calla Lily Ponder watched her mother work beauty shop magic. I have seen the results of that powerful stuff and it always leaves me feeling awed at the power of women-to-woman friendship. Even now when I get my hair done I feel lighter, brighter and more like myself afterward.

Reading this book also reminded me of the glory of first love. There's really nothing else like it. The fast-beating heart, the first time he holds your hand, that first tentative kiss... reading this book helped me travel back in time to relive my own "first love," and that was a glorious time for me.

I wish I had taken off and left home like Calla Lily did. Her experience in New Orleans was just what I would have liked to have done if I hadn't been such a scaredy cat. What fun she had! Reaching out, branching out, learning that life is more than what she knew in her small, small town.

There are so many scenes in this book that broke my heart and others that healed that heart back up again. I urge every woman to read this book. It will take you to places that you never expected to go and will remind you of bittersweet times that you'd forgotten all about. show less

You know those conversations you sometimes have with people where they tell in great length and detail some incident they experienced, and you're waiting excitedly for the climax but it never really comes? For me, Rebecca Wells' The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder was one of those conversations. There are climaxes, of sorts, in the book but they are so Pollyanna-ized and mired in minutia that I was frequently left underwhelmed and uninterested. There just didn't seem to be a rhyme or reason as to why Wells included some of the details she did. Usually authors will put in some obscure detail as foreshadowing, or will, at the very least, connect the dots later on. Wells did not do this. I found myself at loose ends, wondering when show more everything was going to come together.

What does come together is so predictable and sappy that I felt like I had been tricked into reading a Harlequin romance novel.

This novel has some redeeming qualities, at times, but they were, in my opinion, overshadowed by discontinuity, minutia, irrelevance, and smarmy sentimentality that felt contrived. I had hoped for so much more. show less

This book had me in tears THREE times!

1. When a black child was beaten by the sheriff for skating at a white rink even when he had permission from the owner. This scene didn't have significance later in the book, but I'm guessing Rebecca Wells was weaving in an incident she witnessed during childhood or just as a way to remind readers that they shouldn't romanticize this setting and time period too much because while there is plenty charming in a setting like this, there was also brutal evil alongside it.

2. When M'Dear died

3. When sweet Sweet died :( I really loved him.

I could have loved this book. I loved chunks of this book. I didn't love all of it though. Some if it seemed disjointed or pasted together. Some relationships and stories didn't fully develop or seem to have a point. I loved the exploration of mother/daugther relationship and I wish that had been the focus. The love stories never seemed as strong in comparison.