Plum Thicket

by Janice Holt Giles

Book Overview

Janice Holt Giles had a life before her marriage and writing career in Kentucky. Born in Altus, Arkansas, Giles spent many childhood summers visiting her grandparents there. After the success of her historical novel The Kentuckians in 1953, she planned to write a second frontier romance. But a visit to Altus caused her imagination to drift from Kentucky in 1780 to western Arkansas in 1913. At age forty-eight - the same age as Giles at the writing...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0449237672
• ISBN13: 9780449237670
• Release Date: December 1978
• Publisher: Fawcett Books
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Plum Thicket

A Kentucky author, Janet Holt Giles wrote many fine books in the 1950's. One of her best is The Plum Thicket, set in rural Arkansas in the early 1900's. A terrific book, comparable to Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

Beautiful story of childhood innocence and heartbreak

"The Plum Thicket" is a beautiful book. In the tradition of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Giles takes readers on a journey through a child's innocent point of view. By the novel's end, however, that innocent view of the world has been shattered. Set in the early twentieth century in rural Arkansas, the first-person narrator is Katie Rogers, a middle-aged woman visiting the town where her grandparents lived when she was a child. Katie spent many summers at her grandparents' farm, and the entire novel is a flashback to the summer when Katie was 8 years old. Katie is a bright, intelligent child, the daughter of rather progressive thinkers of the time. She absolutely adores her grandfather, a sweet-natured man who is a veteran of the Civil War, something that Katie is very proud of. However, Katie does not like her grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who resents anything sexual about life. (This fact is a very important part of the plot.) Also present on the Rogers farm is Aunt Maggie, whom Katie idolizes. Aunt Maggie is 30 years old and engaged to the local banker, Adam. However, Aunt Maggie is not eager to marry. She regrets never having attained her dream of being an opera singer, despite the years she spent studying voice in New York City. But Aunt Maggie is a fun, cheerful soul, despite that disappointment. Rounding out the farm are Lulie, the cook/maid of both black and white ancestry, and Choctaw, the farm hand who is three-quarters Choctaw Indian and one-quarter black. (Racial and ethnic heritage also play a role in the book's plot.) The character that the book's climax hinges on, however, is the new physician in town, Doctor Jim. Jim is a restless, immoral soul who dreamed of being a famous concert pianist but, like Aunt Maggie, was not successful in his attempt at a musical career. Maggie and Jim share that common ground, and Maggie feels attracted to Jim, but she is also repulsed by his drinking, womanizing, and lack of respect for others. Katie sees a lot of things during that life-changing summer, and to me it's always fascinating to read a novel told from a child's point of view. Katie muses on the differences between Lulie's black Baptist brush arbor meetings and her own family's traditional Methodist church services; her Aunt Maggie's love and respect for Adam versus her love/hate relationship with Doctor Jim; Lulie's comments about the wilder side of life; her grandmother's bitterness; her grandfather's comments about the Confederacy; and a host of other topics. This novel was one of those books that made me sit and think after I'd read the last page. The novel was bittersweet with a heartbreaking turn of events at the end, but it's definitely an excellent work.

I read Plum Thicket

I was enthralled by this book, and literally could not put it down...the beautifully descriptive writing, the sensitivity of the real life characters, the drama in the book. The book kept me spell-bound to the end, and the last fifty pages was a novel in itself. Blew me out of the water. Writing at its best. I highly recommend it!