Product Description

From a place where you don't have to run away to find yourself, this novel's young heroine, Berry, joins the ranks of other memorable and spirited girl narrators such as Bone in "Bastard Out of Carolina," Kaye Gibbon's "Ellen Foster," Lily Owens in "The Secret Life of Bees," and Scout from "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161014 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Nanci Kincaid's As Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me is the touchingly honest story of Berry Jackson, a young teenager growing up Pinetta, Florida, home to two churches, a school, and a gas station. Berry spends her days soaking up the lives of her parents, Ford and Ruthie, her brothers Sowell and Wade, and an amusing array of neighbors that include a wayward preacher, a shotgun toting father of six, and the town's (relatively) wealthy businessman. As Berry navigates her way through young adulthood, she unearths a number of truths and lies that will ultimately serve as the foundation for her sense of self. ("It was not really that I longed to be pretty so bad, I swear, it was that I longed to be real. In Pinetta it seemed like being pretty was the one thing guaranteed to make a girl real.")

The book starts off slowly, and some readers may find themselves losing interest in Kincaid's descriptions of Pinetta's long, hot summer days and their inhabitants. However, once the town is hit by a powerful tornado and Berry's father disappears with the town beauty, the pace picks up and readers are rewarded for their perserverance with an exciting tale of mystery and intrigue. The plot thickens when a chain gang rolls into town to help rebuild the roads and the school, and a certain convict steals the heart of Berry and the rest of the townsfolk. Even after his awful crime is revealed, the people of Pinetta can't help but keep a place for him in their hearts.

Kincaid does a commendable job of getting inside 13-year-old Berry's 13-year-old and showing us how no experience is ever truly black or white. In fact, Kincaid is so talented that by the end of the novel, while allegiances may have shifted a bit one way or another, readers will have a hard time saying goodbye to Berry and her supporting cast of memorable characters. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
Kincaid's fourth novel (after Crossing Blood; Balls; Verbena) is a deliciously intimate portrayal of the sunstruck small town of Pinetta, Fla., as seen through the eyes of Berry, a 13-year-old trying to make sense of adult indiscretions and her own sexual awakening. Berry's father, Ford, is the town's self-righteous school principal; her mother, Ruth, has a crush on the preacher; her good-looking older brother, Sowell, has his "mind... on tits"; her younger brother, Wade is a specialist in "elaborate animal funerals." When Ford mysteriously disappears in the middle of a tornado with Rennie, the town's tragic teenage wannabe starlet, Berry and her family become the subject of much gossip and attention. In her father's absence, her mother shifts her attentions to a rich, hot-tempered neighbor, and Berry develops a crush on Raymond, a smooth-talking convict in town to help clean up after the storm. When Raymond saves Berry's life by coming between her and two rattlesnakes, it's she who fearlessly volunteers to suck the poison out of his leg. Hungry for affection, Berry ultimately gets what she's after, though when she's had it, she's not sure what to make of it. Narrated with childlike honesty and dead-on Southern flavor ("Used to be we would all get in the tub like a can of worms spilled into shallow ditch water"), this is a sticky, sultry gem. (Feb. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Berry Jackson's life is turned upside down one scorchingly hot summer when a tornado tears through Pinetta, her small Florida town, and her father, the local school principal, vanishes into the night. Is he dead? Has he run away with the young woman who has also vanished? And what will this mean to barely adolescent Berry, who has always defined herself as "the principal's daughter"? Small southern towns, vanishing husbands, and adolescent narrators are staples of Kincaid's earlier fiction, and once again her great strength is the creation of a memorably regional, wryly funny, and naturally artful first-person voice. Like seemingly everyone else in Pinetta--where the heart is definitely not a lonely hunter--Berry looks to love for answers, unwisely becoming infatuated with a young prisoner who has been brought to town on a chain gang in the wake of the storm. Love's lessons are sometimes painful ones, but Berry--a terrific character--discovers she can cope when others can't. Kincaid brings a wonderfully engaging authorial sensibility to her story, while her obvious affection for her characters--and theirs for each other--is downright irresistible. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

One of the best books of 2005.
Flawed? Aren't we all.

All of the books I've read this year have flaws, though some are national prize contenders. I haven't heard this book mentioned as a contender, but for me it is thus far the year's most engaging novel.

Some books I admire for their artful qualities even though they don't engage me emotionally, like good dancers you dance with and admire, even though you could never fall in love with them.

Some of them are like an unsatisfactory blind date, books that might make a good read for someone else, but they are not for you.

Once in a blue moon a book comes along that you really fall in love with, that makes you care about the characters and what happens to them. This is such a book for me. It may or may not be for you.

The writing is beautiful, filled with southern humor and insights and things that ring true. The only thing I wished for is that I had it in hardcover, but perhaps that is also part of the book's simple charm here. A casual looking and unpretentious trade paperback with easy to read print and an author's afterward that explains the history behind it. Easy to open, easy to read, easy to love.

It is multilayered--that is to say, the author adroitly uses figurative language, symbolism, and nuances to convey her ideas to those to who can see them. But it is not necessary to see these things to adore this truely rendered narrative voice that trumps any plot flaws that anyone might see in it. Love is like that. And I will never forget this one.

Southern Lit as it should be
I absolutely loved this book!

I used to read a lot of Southern Lit, but too many authors today seem to think that being from the South and putting race in the book somewhere (preferably in a heavy-handed way) makes their books "Southern". In my opinion, Lewis Nordan is one of the few today who do it right. Now I have to add Nanci Kincaid to that list.

This book, is a classic example of the genre. The characters could have fallen straight out of a Welty work. Further, the situations in the small town of Pinetta rang true to me. I had no trouble picturing any of the events happening in the small Southern town I grew up in -- right down to the polite competition between the Baptists and the Methodists. Ms. Kincaid never really played that up, but anyone who grew up in a town like mine could easily identify.

Finally, the book was just plain well written. I was hooked right from the beginning -- a beautiful description of the constant, yet fruitless, quest to find a cool spot in a Southern summer. From there it just got better.

I won't claim that it's another "Mockingbird", but if you like the classic Southern Lit of Welty, Capote, or McCullers I think you'll enjoy this one as well.

An engaging novel!
I loved this book and am glad I knew little about the plot. I always like the reviews that tell why a book is good or bad without revealing the plot - Robert Daley's review is an example of a good review.
Read this book and also read "Balls" by the same author for great stories that are never predictable and thoroughly engaging.