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Ferris Beach Jill McCorkle 9780449912522 Books

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Ferris Beach Jill McCorkle 9780449912522 Books

Little Katie Burns, whose distinguishing physical feature is a wine-colored birthmark on her face, suffers from a tense relationship with her staid, seemingly conservative mother. Like many young girls, she doesn't think of herself as beautiful and she often wishes she had a different mother and imagines, half-seriously, that perhaps she is an orphan adopted into the wrong family. She envies her best friend, Misty, who has the "cool" mom of the neighborhood, and dreams that her mysterious, flighty, fashionable older cousin Angela might be her "real" mother. Similarly, she admires her beautiful classmate Perry Loomis, whom she idealizes for her easygoing popularity with boys. These idols, whose desirable qualities are little more than illusory facades over troubled lives, resemble the nearby Ferris Beach, a resort that Katie visited once, when she was five years old and remembers far more fondly than its ramshackle character warrants.

For Katie, then, growing up means both unveiling the webs of deceit and hypocrisy spun by her supposed betters and shattering her own fairy-tale edifice of self-delusions. In between the homespun wisdom of family life and the Steel Magnolias-style Southern wit, there will be secrets revealed, lives ruined, and misfortunes to be faced. It's all a part of growing up and losing one's innocence. The result is a darkly comic story about a young girl whose fantasies are crushed by a series of tragedies and revelations.

Such a plot is hardly unique among bildungsromans and McCorkle's satire of Southern suburbia can be somewhat conventional. Take, for example, the nosy, gossipy, yet "proper" Mrs. Theresa Poole, a Southern matriarch who could have stepped right off the pages of a Kaye Gibbons novel. Indeed, Kate compares Mrs. Poole to any number of B-movie roles: "She was the busy-body neighbor, the wicked witch, and the teacher with the ruler in her hand. She was that misplaced woman who attempted to maintain aristocracy in a primarily blue-collar town. . . . She was the pillar of the community because she could afford to be." She is, in short, a stereotype.

What keeps this caricature (and others like it) from ludicrousness is McCorkle's deadpan awareness that Mrs. Poole is indeed a stock character. The novel seems to mock the fact that nearly every Southern coming-of-age novel features someone like Mrs. Poole. That is, McCorkle's satire seems directed not only at Southern life but also at the many novels and films about Southern life. And, although "Ferris Beach" was originally published in 1990, reading it now, in its latest paperback reissue, evokes the 1970s in all its shag-carpeted ignominy. Some of the novel's funniest lines blend these motifs to jarring effect, as when the societal concept of the "melting pot" is discussed at a tea party for the Children of the Confederacy or when Misty's malapropism-prone stepmother blithely announces at a Christmas gathering, "Thomas has said that I can sodomize our yard. They're doing it in all the new subdivisions." Although parts of "Ferris Beach" flirt with a soap-opera mawkishness that is not to my personal taste, it contains many acerbic moments like these that undercut the sentimentality of the novel's many heartbreaks and reconciliations.


Tags : Ferris Beach [Jill McCorkle] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. "Whimsically entertaining and dramatically compelling." --The Boston Globe Kate Burns has heard of the magic of Ferris Beach all her life. Kate needs to believe in a little wonder. Shy and self-conscious,Jill McCorkle,Ferris Beach,Ballantine Books,0449912523,Sagas,Fiction,Fiction General,Fiction Sagas,Popular American Fiction

Ferris Beach Jill McCorkle 9780449912522 Books Reviews

I felt I was in the mind of the young girl as she awakened to life's complexities. The adult characters were a little flat for me, but that sort of worked to help me remember that I was viewing big events from young minds. The book had some charm and some nostalgia, but at the end I felt like I had had a glimpse of something, not an immersion. I would be interested to see what a young teen thinks of this. Maybe it hits the right notes for youth.
The book was not what I expected and that was a good thing. It was very different than anything I have read before and appealing to me because it was about ordinary "small town" people. Each character had its own identity and problems. I enjoyed each person's story and then how they all melded together to create the novel. The only reason I gave it just 3 stars is because sometimes it was a little slow but I did enjoy it and would recommend it as a "women's read".
Ferris Beach is a classic coming of age story in the south in the 70's. It takes place in a small NC town, inland from the title town. While the characters are likable and amusing, the story is a bit "Lifetime movie" for my tastes. Certainly, if you love this genre, or grew up in the 70's in a small town in NC, you would enjoy this book. Just be advised that the kindle edition is filled with numerous typos-I wish I had only paid $1.99 and not $3.99!
We follow a young girl, Kitty/Kate from the time she's about nine until she's eighteen, as she copes with the usual mysteries of growing up the secrets of her glamorous cousin Angela.From a plot standpoint, it is a "small" book in terms of thrills and chills, although there is an arson late in the book, but I think this book does capture the kinds of magical thinking young girls have, the sense that something magical can happen at any moment, and also how it feels when you get a little older, and it doesn't.
Well-drawn characters I will think of for a long time...I've been a fan of this author for a while because she loves her characters, even the difficult ones.
Read this /listened to this book for July 2018 book club. Every one (male and female) enjoyed this coming of age story and we all declared that we were glad we read it...which may have been the first unanimous vote ever. We had a great discussion about mothers and daughters, growing up in a small town, the difficulties of being 13 (whatever your gender), and whether or not fairy tale endings exist. While not a comedy, by any description, there were enough laugh out loud funny parts to lighten the mood. And, all of us in our mid-50s loved the early 1970s setting!
This novel begins well, has some startling moments within and finishes unfortunately with a splat. It runs on for too long, and between unnecessary length and lack of reading for corrections, the story itself tends to get lost. Careful editing and a nearby wastebasket (is that obsolete because of laptops?) would have engendered a story that has merit. Basic story young Southern girl growing up encounters a new neighbor across the street with whom she will have a wonderful friendship. She adores her father, tolerates her mother, and romanticizes her relative, Angela, who pops up periodically when in need. The boy in her life changes during the years we cover, cleaning himself up (in every direction) and realizing there are possibilities in his life other than those of his shiftless family. After three emotional catastrophes, our girl wakes to the value of her mother, the knowledge of Angela's slatternly behavior, and the reader knows that the painful act of growing up has yielded some very tortured adolescent truths. A story which has fine elements, interesting personalities, is saddled with lack of careful editing and the abominable keyboard errors which proofreading could so easily catch. I think the author has talent which could shine through if these major glitches were amended.
Little Katie Burns, whose distinguishing physical feature is a wine-colored birthmark on her face, suffers from a tense relationship with her staid, seemingly conservative mother. Like many young girls, she doesn't think of herself as beautiful and she often wishes she had a different mother and imagines, half-seriously, that perhaps she is an orphan adopted into the wrong family. She envies her best friend, Misty, who has the "cool" mom of the neighborhood, and dreams that her mysterious, flighty, fashionable older cousin Angela might be her "real" mother. Similarly, she admires her beautiful classmate Perry Loomis, whom she idealizes for her easygoing popularity with boys. These idols, whose desirable qualities are little more than illusory facades over troubled lives, resemble the nearby Ferris Beach, a resort that Katie visited once, when she was five years old and remembers far more fondly than its ramshackle character warrants.

For Katie, then, growing up means both unveiling the webs of deceit and hypocrisy spun by her supposed betters and shattering her own fairy-tale edifice of self-delusions. In between the homespun wisdom of family life and the Steel Magnolias-style Southern wit, there will be secrets revealed, lives ruined, and misfortunes to be faced. It's all a part of growing up and losing one's innocence. The result is a darkly comic story about a young girl whose fantasies are crushed by a series of tragedies and revelations.

Such a plot is hardly unique among bildungsromans and McCorkle's satire of Southern suburbia can be somewhat conventional. Take, for example, the nosy, gossipy, yet "proper" Mrs. Theresa Poole, a Southern matriarch who could have stepped right off the pages of a Kaye Gibbons novel. Indeed, Kate compares Mrs. Poole to any number of B-movie roles "She was the busy-body neighbor, the wicked witch, and the teacher with the ruler in her hand. She was that misplaced woman who attempted to maintain aristocracy in a primarily blue-collar town. . . . She was the pillar of the community because she could afford to be." She is, in short, a stereotype.

What keeps this caricature (and others like it) from ludicrousness is McCorkle's deadpan awareness that Mrs. Poole is indeed a stock character. The novel seems to mock the fact that nearly every Southern coming-of-age novel features someone like Mrs. Poole. That is, McCorkle's satire seems directed not only at Southern life but also at the many novels and films about Southern life. And, although "Ferris Beach" was originally published in 1990, reading it now, in its latest paperback reissue, evokes the 1970s in all its shag-carpeted ignominy. Some of the novel's funniest lines blend these motifs to jarring effect, as when the societal concept of the "melting pot" is discussed at a tea party for the Children of the Confederacy or when Misty's malapropism-prone stepmother blithely announces at a Christmas gathering, "Thomas has said that I can sodomize our yard. They're doing it in all the new subdivisions." Although parts of "Ferris Beach" flirt with a soap-opera mawkishness that is not to my personal taste, it contains many acerbic moments like these that undercut the sentimentality of the novel's many heartbreaks and reconciliations.