She Flew Coop Pb [Paperback]

The Nepper family, with Vangie, Henry, and Olive, are the core of the book. Vangie is a poignant woman whose naivete shields her from seeing the truth about her daughter and her husband, but who finally flies the coop and demonstrates her strength when she has had enough. It is Vangie who keeps the home fires burning, and her flower gardens growing, who assumes her pharmacist husband is the faithful, truthful man she believes she married. Together Vangie and Henry face the suicidal poisoning of their only child. Apart, when Henry has violated all the principles of his wedding vows by falling in total lust with DeeDee Robichaux, each meets his own destiny.

The town's solidarity around the lone Baptist church sets up the downfall of the hypocritical church leader, the young, and dashing bachelor preacher, Reverend T. C. Kirby, whose personal secrets lurk in the background, as he seduces women of all ages to suit his own devilish whims.

The right and wrong social sides of town are made clear, with the tragic Robichaux family living among the outcasts of Hayes Street, and the Neppers, Galliards, Hoopers, and LeGettes residing as neighbors on Cypress Street across from the oxbow of water known as Lake Limoges. In the fictional Limoges, all streets are either named for U. S. Presidents or for flowers and trees.

Linking all the upper and lower class families together are the children, especially red-haired Billie Robichaux, the enterprising daughter of DeeDee and her miserable Korean War veteran Reney, now a wheel-chair bound paraplegic. DeeDee's Aunt Butter is their landlord. Butter, owner of a town eatery, provides a home for the ingrates that are DeeDee and Reney. She sacrifices her home's sanctity for the drunken destruction of Reney who feeds off the hatred he has for DeeDee, his whoring wife. Butter is the refuge that Billie deserves, however. And Billie, in her efforts to survive her poverty and the dysfunction of her parents, finds ways to work for the well-off ladies of Cypress street.

Knitting the families of Cypress together is Sophie Donnell, the black maid to Vangie Nepper, Waldean LeGette, Harriet Hooper, and Edith Galliard. Sophie is the ultimate survivor, as she is the brutally abused wife of Burr, a wife-beater any reader will love to hate. As a day maid and cook, Sophie, knows the business of all the households, and they in turn wonder why she continues to take Burr's abuse, even sheltering her whenever they can. She is one of the noble characters of the novel.

Israel, the black mortician's helper at Beaulieu's is another noble character. As an old bachelor, he does his work taking in the dead to prepare for burial, and lives a solitary life of independent respectability.

There is rich humor in this book, some of it laugh out loud in nature, a great comic relief to the rougher scenes. An especially endearing comic narrative comes from the owner of the town's funeral home, Cab Beaulieu, as he explains his sexual history. Even more delightful is his encounter with Vangie's sister-in-law, and his neighbor, the widowed older woman, Edith Galliard. His entanglement with this widow is one he cannot escape.

Each part of this novel is laced with the real heart of life in northeastern Louisiana in 1952, the recipes that feed the very soul of the populace. Those recipes reveal the joy of food, the importance of its sustenance in a story that is rich and calorie laden.

Third person chapters are interspersed with first person narratives of the many characters. In these narratives, West executes exceptional skill. The voice and dialect of each person according to their race, class, age, is right on the mark.

One feels like they have lived four months of 1952 in Limoges, learning its most human secrets, good and evil. These people of West's fiction are hauntingly real, just like the recipes that they share.