Scan barcode
A review by jenbsbooks
The Price of Bread and Shoes: A Novel by Lonormi Manuel
4.5
I haven't been sleeping well ... which I guess allows for more reading time. Someone had mentioned this in a FB group. I currently have KindleUnlimited. This was text only (no audio available). It was a good read. Emotional, sad, and informative.
It was 3rd person/past tense. The main character is Alafair. I really struggled with that name, have never heard it before. The first chapter, we get in her head, her POV, as she comes to join her husband at a small coal mining town in the 1920s.
The second chapter threw me a bit ... changing POVs, in the head of Martina; a "working girl" ... who happens to be with Alifair's husband. Chapter three is back to Alifair, but the chapter 4 switches to Callie Stanley (the neighbor and town midwife). Alifair gets a majority of chapters, but there is a lot of switching to several other women ... Bonnie, a young girl, pregnant but won't name the father; Vine, Bonnie's mother; Miss Violet Maiden, head bookkeeper for the mining company. Loujean, Callie's daughter. It's just the women's POVs. Their stories. Simple chronological chapters, no headers telling the POV, just just figure it out as you read. Would I have preferred having headers, in the Table of Contents (to review a particular chapter, knowing where to go?)
There seemed to be some editing issues - some hyphens, like words were split at the end of a line, and then the spacing changed, but the hyphens stayed, even with the word in the middle of the page. figur-ing, wish-ing, vary-ing. There were also some random numbers inserted into the text ... 105, 227. Not sure why they were there.
At the beginning, there was some talk of the Spanish flu, interesting to note the parallels to the recent Covid pandemic "As a precaution, the city ordered schools, theaters, public entertainments and churches to close ..."
I did feel some connections - made some highlights/saved quotes
*She wished he had just hit her. It would have hurt less than his words.
*Grief was the same in every tongue.
*More righteous than kind
*Pretending not to care, determined to pretend until the pretending came true.
*It's a hard life for a woman, married to a man who's married to the bottle.
*She would rather be dead and in her own grave than have her parents seeing her from some far-off heaven.
*... reminded her that is was his place to make the money and her place to spend it. He'd treated he like a child who was demanding admittance to the grown-up world.
*... a recurring pattern of hair-trigger conflict, followed by an awkward reconciliation and an uneasy truce.
Lots of talk on being a woman - assuming blame and guilt, being insufficient and inadequate. An interesting metaphor of a broken teacup, glued back together, but actually useless (can't fulfill its purpose anymore).
Some of the words I note: roiling, route (not audio, so no pronunciation ... how did I read it? I can't remember!), hearth, cacophony, smirk/scowl, surfeit, brindled.
No proFanity. There was the N word. No explicit sex descriptions, but there is rape and domestic violence, as well as suicide/murder and other death/injury.
Title absolutely ties in ... sadly.
It was 3rd person/past tense. The main character is Alafair. I really struggled with that name, have never heard it before. The first chapter, we get in her head, her POV, as she comes to join her husband at a small coal mining town in the 1920s.
The second chapter threw me a bit ... changing POVs, in the head of Martina; a "working girl" ... who happens to be with Alifair's husband. Chapter three is back to Alifair, but the chapter 4 switches to Callie Stanley (the neighbor and town midwife). Alifair gets a majority of chapters, but there is a lot of switching to several other women ... Bonnie, a young girl, pregnant but won't name the father; Vine, Bonnie's mother; Miss Violet Maiden, head bookkeeper for the mining company. Loujean, Callie's daughter. It's just the women's POVs. Their stories. Simple chronological chapters, no headers telling the POV, just just figure it out as you read. Would I have preferred having headers, in the Table of Contents (to review a particular chapter, knowing where to go?)
There seemed to be some editing issues - some hyphens, like words were split at the end of a line, and then the spacing changed, but the hyphens stayed, even with the word in the middle of the page. figur-ing, wish-ing, vary-ing. There were also some random numbers inserted into the text ... 105, 227. Not sure why they were there.
At the beginning, there was some talk of the Spanish flu, interesting to note the parallels to the recent Covid pandemic "As a precaution, the city ordered schools, theaters, public entertainments and churches to close ..."
I did feel some connections - made some highlights/saved quotes
*She wished he had just hit her. It would have hurt less than his words.
*Grief was the same in every tongue.
*More righteous than kind
*Pretending not to care, determined to pretend until the pretending came true.
*It's a hard life for a woman, married to a man who's married to the bottle.
*She would rather be dead and in her own grave than have her parents seeing her from some far-off heaven.
*... reminded her that is was his place to make the money and her place to spend it. He'd treated he like a child who was demanding admittance to the grown-up world.
*... a recurring pattern of hair-trigger conflict, followed by an awkward reconciliation and an uneasy truce.
Lots of talk on being a woman - assuming blame and guilt, being insufficient and inadequate. An interesting metaphor of a broken teacup, glued back together, but actually useless (can't fulfill its purpose anymore).
Some of the words I note: roiling, route (not audio, so no pronunciation ... how did I read it? I can't remember!), hearth, cacophony, smirk/scowl, surfeit, brindled.
No proFanity. There was the N word. No explicit sex descriptions, but there is rape and domestic violence, as well as suicide/murder and other death/injury.
Title absolutely ties in ... sadly.