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Natalie Manuel's Reviews > Betty
Betty
by
by
3.75
Betty is one of the hardest books I've ever reviewed. It feels wrong to give it three stars, to lump it in with average, forgettable books while at the same time 4-5 stars doesn't reflect my reading experience.
Betty is set in the foothills of the Ohio Appalachians and follows Betty Carpenter, a half Cherokee/half white child and her large family. There's no flowery way to say it - this book is absolutely filled with trauma - racism, incest, rape, animal abuse, poverty, and death. If you find dark books hard to read, this one is not for you.
The strength of the novel is in McDaniel's prose, which is really beautiful and lyrical. Landon, Betty's dad, is the central 'adult' figure in the novel and is a wonderful, thoughtful man who spends a lot of time trying to understand and give hope to his children. We get a lot of his 'stories', his explanations for the natural world and Cherokee traditions. He imparts his wisdom to Betty, the only child out of the six children who 'looks' Cherokee and their relationship is a highlight of the novel.
Its weakness though, is the lack of a plot for the bulk of the book and the repetitiveness of "nice story from Landon" followed by "violent piece of trauma". Rinse, repeat. As much as I liked Landon's explanations of everything, it was too much - we needed to get enough to understand his character and his relationship with Betty, but when it became story/trauma/story/trauma, I found it hard to stay engaged.
That for me was essentially the problem. I would be engaged during the traumatic, dramatic part of the chapter, and then that would fade away and we'd be back to a fairly uninteresting account of some siblings playing together. Towards the last quarter of the book, so many bad things happen at once that I had the same reaction as when I read A Little Life - I checked out.
Character development was decent, but because we only have Betty's point of view as a child, retold from Betty as an adult, we don't really get much of a feel of the other character's relationships with each other. For example, we barely see any interaction at all between the mother and father. What did Landon think of his wife's behaviour? What did the other kids feel for their mother? Did she treat them the same as she treated Betty? I have no idea and wish I knew.
There is a lot of good in this novel, the beautiful writing, the solid characters, the truly heartbreaking stories, but an account of trauma without any light in it at all is difficult to enjoy.
Betty is one of the hardest books I've ever reviewed. It feels wrong to give it three stars, to lump it in with average, forgettable books while at the same time 4-5 stars doesn't reflect my reading experience.
Betty is set in the foothills of the Ohio Appalachians and follows Betty Carpenter, a half Cherokee/half white child and her large family. There's no flowery way to say it - this book is absolutely filled with trauma - racism, incest, rape, animal abuse, poverty, and death. If you find dark books hard to read, this one is not for you.
The strength of the novel is in McDaniel's prose, which is really beautiful and lyrical. Landon, Betty's dad, is the central 'adult' figure in the novel and is a wonderful, thoughtful man who spends a lot of time trying to understand and give hope to his children. We get a lot of his 'stories', his explanations for the natural world and Cherokee traditions. He imparts his wisdom to Betty, the only child out of the six children who 'looks' Cherokee and their relationship is a highlight of the novel.
Its weakness though, is the lack of a plot for the bulk of the book and the repetitiveness of "nice story from Landon" followed by "violent piece of trauma". Rinse, repeat. As much as I liked Landon's explanations of everything, it was too much - we needed to get enough to understand his character and his relationship with Betty, but when it became story/trauma/story/trauma, I found it hard to stay engaged.
That for me was essentially the problem. I would be engaged during the traumatic, dramatic part of the chapter, and then that would fade away and we'd be back to a fairly uninteresting account of some siblings playing together. Towards the last quarter of the book, so many bad things happen at once that I had the same reaction as when I read A Little Life - I checked out.
Character development was decent, but because we only have Betty's point of view as a child, retold from Betty as an adult, we don't really get much of a feel of the other character's relationships with each other. For example, we barely see any interaction at all between the mother and father. What did Landon think of his wife's behaviour? What did the other kids feel for their mother? Did she treat them the same as she treated Betty? I have no idea and wish I knew.
There is a lot of good in this novel, the beautiful writing, the solid characters, the truly heartbreaking stories, but an account of trauma without any light in it at all is difficult to enjoy.
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Reading Progress
February 26, 2022
– Shelved as:
to-read
February 26, 2022
– Shelved
October 31, 2023
–
Started Reading
November 7, 2023
–
Finished Reading
