Betty: The International Bestseller

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i enjoyed The Summer that Melted Everything a bunch, but Betty; a standalone with spillover into TSTME, has so much more weight. i remember bits and pieces from The Summer that Melted Everything—i remember the language being striking, i remember the framework and a few details in particular, but this one is going to stay in my brain for a lot longer, and there are specific scenes i know are with me for life; not as fond memories of a book i enjoyed, but as straight-up reader scars. Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my rating in any way. Or, in the case of ‘Betty,’ the author has reached out to a fellow reviewer due to geographical similarities. In this instance, Tiffany had reached out to my friend and fellow Team KR member Miranda Crites, as Miranda lives in Appalachia. Unfortunately, Miranda was unable to get to it by release date, so she offered it to the KR team. I’d seen ‘Betty’ mentioned a few times, but when I read Edward Lorn’s review, and then saw Laurie’s (aka Barks) I knew I needed to review this. Guernica: It seems like Betty also finds relief in her own writing, because of how it allows her to escape from life while recording it. It reminds me of how her father feels about the stories he tells.

this book is sad. it is SAD. it is beautiful and broken and filled with tenderness and love and cruelty and neglect and it is SEARING. i cannot emphasize enough that, like life, it is a mixture of sad and lovely. although, also like life, for every sad you see coming, there’ll be two that’ll catch you off guard.

I realized then that not only did Dad need us to believe his stories, we needed to believe them as well. To believe in unripe stars and eagles able to do extraordinary things. What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to. It’d be so much easier if the bad things in our lives were kept in our skin that we could shed off like a snake. Then we could leave all the dried horrid things on the ground and step forward, free from them. Guernica: The story of Betty exposes many real secrets kept by your family. What was it like to learn these things?

Betty is our narrator and she tells us her family’s story from 1909, her father’s birth to 1973, the year he died. Her parents were dirt poor and after a few years of moving around, they settled in an abandoned house lent by a friend in Breathed, Ohio. It was Leland’s hometown. They lived off the land, off the medicine Landon could concoct and off odd jobs. They were dirt-poor. be it in the woods or in their house: ( sometimes the story had a childlike fairytale ‘feel’)... but with the devastations - it’s not a child’s book) I voted for The Summer That Melted Everything to win every literary prize in 2016. I will be right there shouting from the rooftops that I loved this book. Please be aware that while I call this book beautiful in so many ways, dark things happen to and within this family. That is not what this book is about. Powerful, emotional, beautifully descriptive and haunting, I will never forget Betty, her indelible story, or the way she shared it through her daughter’s masterful skill. McDaniel: I’m very fair-skinned, so it’s important to separate my experiences from those of my mother and grandfather. My own experiences haven’t had that sort of violence attached to them. I don’t know what it’s like to experience racism. I came of age in predominantly white communities, so I fit in. Mom really struggled. Growing up, people would ask if she was my real mother because of the difference in our skin colors.This book will make your blood boil. It will make you want to scream at the unfairness of it all. It will totally get under your skin. But most of all, it will show you how resilient people are when faced with the most impossible things, and it will fill you with hope. Isn’t this what parenthood is all about? Steadying feet and hanging lanterns along the path to adulthood? Betty’s mother, Alka, has a tormented past, and she has her share of difficulty with mental health as a result. The author writes about this with honesty and openness, while showing how most of the family adapts, supporting one another. There’s such tenderness between many of the characters, such complete devotion. There’s complexity, too, where their human nature comes into play, the push and pull so many families experience in their dynamic. No one is perfect, and Betty, with her insightful narrative doesn’t hide anything from the reader. Betty is bold and strong and completely authentic. A heartbreaking yet magical story, Betty is a punch-in-the-gut of a novel - full of the crushing cruelty of human nature and the redemptive power of words. I would recommend this book to lovers of literary fiction, but also to readers who'd like to read diverse books.