My two days off passed quickly if not productively. I did go to the dentist yesterday, for the first time in Years. My teeth need a Lot of work, but I am glad to have at least started on it. (My next of many appointments to come is on the 21st.) And the dentist did give me a scrip for Vicodin, which definitely helps. Ron did do a load of laundry yesterday, though not the big catch up of lotsa laundry I had planned. And maybe tomorrow I will manage to go get the haircut that was the other thing on my agenda.
After reading and blogging about the history of Moon Pies last week, this book caught my eye while shelving in New Fiction. Moon Pies and Movie Stars is a comic novel set in the 1970’s about Ruby Kinkade, a widow in Devine, Texas (pop 847) who runs the local bowling alley and is raising her daughter Violet’s two children after Violet mysteriously disappeared four years ago. One day Violet is spotted in a television commercial and Ruby and her sister Loralva set off in a Winnebago with Violet’s mother-in-law and the kids on a trek to Hollywood to find Violet.
The writing is at times quite funny, though the pacing is a bit off and the book seems to drag at times. There is a very time-warp feeling in the 1970’s details, and the Texas parochialism of the characters and their reactions to California is by turns amusing and off-putting. After waiting in line and appearing on The Price Is Right, where Loralva charms Bob Barker and the producers and ends up winning a new car, they do finally manage to find Violet and are disappointed that she has no interest in them or the children she left behind. In the end, I found myself thinking the book was in fact much like a Moon Pie– almost sickly sweet, but very little substance. Not recommended.
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