Product Description

Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, an illegitimate young girl, dreams of escaping her Greenville County, South Carolina, home, her notorious, hard-living family, and the unwanted attentions of her abusive stepfather, Daddy Glen. A first novel. Reprint. National Book Award finalist. NYT.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39459 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780452287051
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Allison spikes her critically acclaimed first novel, a National Book Award nominee, with pungent characters, and saturates it with a sense of its setting--Greenville, S.C.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Set in the rural South, this tale centers around the Boatwright family, a proud and closeknit clan known for their drinking, fighting, and womanizing. Nicknamed Bone by her Uncle Earle, Ruth Anne is the bastard child of Anney Boatwright, who has fought tirelessly to legitimize her child. When she marries Glen, a man from a good family, it appears that her prayers have been answered. However, Anney suffers a miscarriage and Glen begins drifting. He develops a contentious relationship with Bone and then begins taking sexual liberties with her. Embarrassed and unwilling to report these unwanted advances, Bone bottles them up and acts out her confusion and shame. Unaware of her husband's abusive behavior, Anney stands by her man. Eventually, a violent encounter wrests Bone away from her stepfather. In this first novel, Allison creates a rich sense of family and portrays the psychology of a sexually abused child with sensitivity and insight. Recommended for general fiction collections.
-Kimberly G. Allen, National Assn. of Home Builders Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A girl comes of age in '50's South Carolina fighting the label ``trash'' and the violent advances of her stepfather: an overly familiar story as Allison (Trash, 1988) handles the material in a surprisingly nostalgic way. When narrator Ruth Ann Boatwright (nicknamed Bone) is born to 15-year-old unmarried Anney, the word ``ILLEGITIMATE'' is stamped in big red letters on the birth certificate; for years, Anney will stubbornly try to get a new document without the glaring stigma. She will also try to make a decent home for her two daughters, marrying Glen Waddell, who--the black sheep of a prominent local family--admires the heavy-drinking, brawling Boatwright men. Glen adores Anney but the Boatwrights have their reservations: ``the boy could turn like whiskey in a bad barrel.'' Indeed, not only does he have trouble holding a job but soon makes Bone a scapegoat for his frustrations: she suffers beatings and sexual molestation, keeping silent in order not to spoil her mother's hard-won happiness. Though the family triangle is the dramatic center of the novel, the narrative meanders through the story of the Boatwright clan. Bone reflects on her strong and independent (if hard-treated) aunts and appreciates family strength, love, and loyalty while recognizing that the outside world sees the Boatwrights as antisocial trash. Compassionate if not very compelling; after the often searing power of Allison's short stories, she seems not to have claimed her voice so much as tamed it. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Powerful and Heart-Wrenching
I read this book as part of a college literature assignment. Bastard Out of Carolina is a well-written, deeply moving, and unforgettable novel about a young southern girl's struggle with physical and sexual abuse, along with the stigma of being labeled "white trash" and "illegitimate." Ms. Allison's characters are vibrant and alive, especially the young girl, Bone, who poignantly tells the tale of her tormented youth. For all its literary worth, this is not a book that I would have read on my own. The story is deeply disturbing, not only in its content but in the underlying hopelessness of tone. One feels an overwhelming instinct to cradle Bone in one's arms to protect her from her frustrated, jealous, and emotionally disturbed stepfather and from her mother's senseless abandonment. Bone's reactions of burning anger, festering hatred, and perverted fantasies, along with her resultant self image, compound the hopelessness of her young life. Salvation and vindication can only be acquired through her love of gospel music...and although she's told repeatedly that she can't sing, her heart yearns and pleads to God for the gift of song. But the gift of salvation through Jesus that God freely offers is never accepted, and only Bone knows why. Instead of salvation, Bone finds a haven in the home of her lesbian aunt, Raylene. While Raylene is a compassionate, strong, and loving woman, the reader is left with the impression at the conclusion of the story that Bone struggles with her experiences for the rest of her life. Perhaps the quote by James Baldwin at the beginning of the book says it best: "People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead." In the end, no matter what injustices we face in this life, we all will have to answer for how we choose to live our lives. We can choose to be defeated, or we can choose to overcome. Bone's true vindication remains irretrievably in her hands.

Six stars, anyone?
Yowtch! This searing quasi-autobiography dressed up as fiction is worth every painful moment it takes to get through it. The book's title says a lot: it's the story of the childhood of a "white trash bastard" and her battles against physical and sexual abuse. I wonder: was this the first book that inaugurated the era of so many memoirs about childhood abuse that Oprah eventually elevated to mythic levels?
Bastard out of Carolina is a scarey story with memorable characters who will haunt readers nearly as thoroughly as they haunted Bone, the child protagonist: the violent ones, the jealous ones, the just plain weird ones, the inexplicable ones...
This is not a book with a happy ending. One gets the sense that the end of the story hasn't been written - possibly because the author hasn't lived it yet.
Outstanding. Worth 6 stars.

Overcoming stigmas in Southern Culture
Having grown up in the south myself I saw the stigmas portrayed in Allison's book to be true. It is hard to express to people who were not in this environment what it was like, but Allison has done this in her book. Basterd out of Carolina is an excellent book in that it tells the story of "Bone" Boatwright, and her life as poor white trash in the south. Bone's speech patterns in telling the story are so clear and easy to read that it adds to the books authenticity and to it's believability. She tells about her mother's struggle to remove the illigitimate label from her birth cirtificate, and how this affected her life. Bone had to fight to prove herself to the world around her. She didn't want to be the bastard people called her, she didn't want to have people control her through their labels. Included in this struggle is the story of overcoming the abuse she receives from "Daddy Glen" her step father. He beats her and molests her, under the guise that she asked for it. It is only through the help of her uncles and her aunts that she is able to rise above the abuse, and the abandonment from her mother and become the person she wants to be. The book is partly autobiographical on the part of Allison, and she has used her own experiences to tell a powerful story of strength. I reccomend this book to people who enjoyed books by Fannie Flagg, and anyone who has had to deal with abuse and/or abandonment