Vera CleaverRecensioni

Harperteen

“Friends were another thing Miss Breathitt believed in and thought wonderful. Friends, she said, improved talents and happiness and all of us should take care to make some.”
― Vera Cleaver, Where the Lilies Bloom

This is a book about Mary Call, a strong minded young woman trying to keep her family together after the loss of her parents. She feeds and clothes her siblings and tries to keep up the pretense that her parents are still there, for if outsiders knew what had happened they would surely separate the family.

I. LOVED. THIS.

The book is a wonderful read. There are themes of loss and poverty. The characters start to feel like old friends. One gets invested and roots for the sassy Mary Call and her small group of siblings as they fight to stay together in the North Carolina mountains.

This is an exceptional and very special book that nobody should miss out on.

In the mountains of North Carolina, at some unspecified time in the past (I pictured the 1930s as I read) a down-and-out family of tenant farmers suffers a dreadful string of catastrophes, but is held together by 14-year-old Mary Call, who takes charge.
Their mother died before the story begins, and their father dies shortly into it, leaving Mary Call, a younger brother and sister, and her older, but somewhat mentally handicapped sister Devola, who is 18. Mary Call decides the only way the four of them can survive, is to keep it a secret that their father has died. Otherwise, the county social workers will come take them away. They make a little money by wildcrafting (gathering medicinal plants and selling them in town) and manage to stay in their ramshackle house because Mary Call sort of tricked the owner into giving it to them.
Mary Call manages to hold things steady for a while, but as the story works towards its close, her efforts begin to unravel.
Mary Call is a fierce heroine, and I loved her for it. But I loved her all the more at the end, when she reluctantly acknowledges that even she may need some help once in a while.

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Kitty Dale is a ten-year old girl who is unwanted by either of her parents. She manages to lie to try to find her father, only to discover that he has an adopted daughter now who she knew nothing about, and then her mother, who is about to be married to the owner of a brick factory. Her mother shoves her off on an eccentric older lady in town known to all as Aunt Petal. With Aunt Petal and her nephew Tom, Kitty finally finds a degree of happiness.
Well written, but not a very satisfying story. In the end, Kitty still has to leave Aunt Petal and go back to the "home" where she had been living before. The story suggests that Kitty found resolution to the issue that neither of her parents want anything to do with her, but I didn't find the resolution convincing.½

Vera Cleaver presented life in the mountains for this family well. As the oldest of children, Mary Call watched their dad give up on life and die. She finds strength,not giving up, but in keeping her dad's wishes, even to burying him without telling the town's people. At fourteen, she struggles with making money and keeping the town's people from knowing they are without any parents to watch them.

Their struggles get harder.
You hold to her strength as she tries not to cry when her younger brother tries to pull more than a ten-year old boy can. Yet falls back and acts like a ten-year old at other times.

It is a story of struggle, of life, of not quitting, of keeping your word.
You see the poor---who don't expect help from others. They think of a way to make it work.

Meant for older children in the difficulty of the content, but with discussion acceptable for even younger ages.

A 14-year-old girl in Appalachia struggles to hold her family together after both her parents die, keeping their orphanhood secret from the adults around them and taking up wildcrafting to survive.
A harsh tale, fairly softly told. I enjoyed it mostly, although the ending was a bit too pat, really.

What a story!

Mary Call is thrust into the position of provider for the three siblings after her father sickens and dies. She and her brother covertly bury him on their property, and they must keep up the pretense that he is still in the sickroom with outsiders. Mary Call is a strong fourteen-year-old, and she courageously schemes and plots to secure the land and home and food for her family while railing against her chief adversary, Kaiser Pease.

You won't run across a stronger girl character than Mary Call, I think, and you won't find a more compelling story than Where the Lilies Bloom.½

I have finally learned that the Cleavers' books are written very subtly. They're more like that kind of *L*iterature that intellectual book clubs prefer, than like most other children's books we're mostly used to reading. The reader has to figure out all the 'why did he do that?s' and 'so whats' and 'but what abouts' for her/him-self.

For example: Is Hazel's mom justified to elude her maternal responsibilities, or is she a bad mom? Or is that the wrong question? Are most moms either good or bad, or is grey a much more relevant color than black or white?

I really liked watching Hazel learn about how to care for her citrus orchard, and the little plant-selling adventure was engaging. I do recommend this, or probably any Cleaver novel, for thoughtful readers who think current children's lit is too laden with adventurous fantasy and authors' sociological agendas.

Not as old-fashioned as I expected. The ending was exactly what I was rooting for it to be all along - but yet not a predictable cliche.

Challenging. Almost poetical. Sometimes elliptical, as in, a reader really has to be paying attention to figure out what's going on - especially what's going on in the inner lives of the characters. I'm still thinking about different aspects of it. But it's powerful and original, recommended if you like quietly thoughtful children's books.

3.5 stars. I can definitely see why the Cleaver's books were so lauded. Bold, thoughtful, heartwarming, strong & complex young girls. I do think it's a shame that only Where the Lilies Bloom is still famous. I'm going to keep reading the ones I can get a hold of, though. This was a discard from Fresno's library that I found in a thrift store down there.

This was one of those books that was on my Battle of the Books reading list that I never got around to reading. As such, it's been sitting on my to-read list since middle school. Finally getting around to it as part of my current effort to read all the books I own.

What a magnificent story. Not only is it the tale of a girl forced to take charge of her family at the tender age of 14 after her father takes ill and suddenly passes, but it is also a fascinating story of North Carolina rural mountain living and the art of wildcrafting.

Mary Call Luther is a strong young woman who has to face great adversity at a young age and keep her family together at all costs. She comes up with a plan, though perhaps not as well thought out as she thinks, and sticks to it as best she can. This is a story of determination.

Love this book. It tells how a young girl and her siblings make it through hardships in their lives.

Where the Lillies Bloom tells about a family of children who are left on their own after losing their parents. The children support themselves by "wildcrafting." They look for plants in the mountains and sell them to drug stores in town. Even though the situation the children find themselves in is difficult, the story is told with a lot of humor. You grow to care about the characters very much.

This was a great book. It was about the Luther family that lives in these mountians in North Carolina. But then there father Roy Luther dies , and they have to keep it a secret from everyone because if because Marry call (Roy Luthers daughter)makes a promise to not tell anyone and to not get doctors because he belives they chop people because they killed his mother.Then they have to go to wildcrafting and gathering to earn money to live. But when the winter comes, all the plants die and they run out of money. Then later on, their land owner (Kieser Pease) decides to take back their house. Then a few days later he gets hit by a car and is placed in a hospital for care and treatment. At the end of the book, he maries Devola (Mary Calls sister) and gives them money and a car and a cow,and hams.

This was a really goood book. It was about a family that lives in the mountians. But then there dad dies, and they have to keep it a secret from everyone. They have to turn to wildcrafting and gathering to earn money. But when winter comes, all the plants die and they run out of money. Then later on, their land owner decides to take back their house. Then a few days later he gets hit by a cas and is hospatilezed. At the end, he maries the main characters sister and gives them money and cars.

The end

Mary-Call is the narrator of this book. She has a brother named Romey (10) a little sister named Ima-Dean (5) and a older sister named Devola. (18) Devola can be described as 'cloudy headed.' She is the daughter of Roy and Cosby (Deceased) Luther and they are sharecroppers. Roy Luther is extremely sick at this time. One day, Mary-Call and her brother Romey go to their landlord, Keiser Pease's, house. They find him sick. In order for them to heal him, he has to sign a paper that gives them the land they have to work. They get this land but now they don't have any source of food or anything. They start to wildcraft so they can get money. The day after a successful day of wildcrafting, Roy Luther dies. Mary-Call and Romey bury him. They have to keep this a secret from everyone else that lives around them. Keiser is giving them gifts to impress Devola. After a lot of wildcrafting and Mary-Call and Romey going to school, Keiser's sister comes. She said that she owns the land and they have to move out. Keiser pays for this land and marries Devola. Mary-Call, Romey, and Ima-Dean are living comfortably now.

I enjoyed this book. I liked their dialect and the storyline. However, I didn't really like how they make it seem like they live in the 1600s instead of the 1970s.½

http://leavesandpages.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/review-hazel-rye-by-vera-and-bill...
A short novel published for the older elementary school ages.
Hazel Rye is a slight novel, one of those “relationship”-slash-”issues”-slash-”problem” tales so common in elementary school libraries. The idea, it seems, is to make sure that any particular problem a child might be facing in his or her life can be eased by referring said child to a book featuring a similar situation. Want to be a football star but didn’t make the team? Here, read this. Being bullied at school because you’re fat/thin/gay/gawky/smart/slow? Super popular but still unhappy because your friends are all so shallow? Adopted and having issues with it? Foster kid? Mom and Dad divorcing? Pregnant? Big brother dying of AIDS? Best friend dying of cancer? Mother dying of cancer? YOU’RE dying of cancer? You name it, there’s a story that addresses it, usually with a Big Helpful Conclusion of some sort to help the reader cope with the issue by learning that even though bad stuff happens, he/she is not alone.

All of the above being great topics to drive a novel, but so terribly often the storytelling gets lost in the shuffle, what with The Issue taking precedence. The characters exist merely to mouth the words; they’re frequently merely the framework The Issue gets draped over; we never get to know them, let alone form any sort of personal relationship with them.

What I’m aiming at with my opinionated dismissal of so much well-meaning but misses-its-mark-as-good-fiction juvenile literature is to say that though this particular book fits into the category of an “issues” book, it’s just a little bit different, and it works well as a purely enjoyable read. It also seems aimed at perhaps a more mature audience than that stated on the cover, or maybe I should say “likely to be appreciated by”, rather than aimed at. For Hazel Rye – the book as well as the character – is a bit out of the ordinary.

The titular protagonist is an eleven-year-old girl living in a small community surrounded by orange groves in central Florida. Hazel’s Big Obvious Issue is that she’s slow in school; we find out on the first page that she’s just flunked sixth grade, and though she pretends not to mind all of the evidence points to a sorely bruised psyche.

Hazel’s eighteen-year-old brother Donnie has just been married; he lives nearby and is doing just fine taxi-driving; Hazel holds his financial success in high regard and likes to think that she too could do as well in a few years, once this bothersome school time is over; Donnie dropped out at sixteen and no one seems too concerned about it. Her mother is a fragile hypochondriac, too involved in her woes to take much interest in housekeeping, let alone mothering her daughter. As the story starts, Ona Rye is about to leave for a prolonged visit to her family in Tennessee. The parental mantle in the household rests firmly on the shoulders of Hazel’s father, Millard, a hard-working and successful carpentry contractor. He and Hazel are not just father-and-daughter but also very close friends – “buddies” – with occasional bouts of flash-in-the-pan violent squabbles to keep things interesting between them. It was after one of these arguments that Millard transferred ownership of his small, neglected orange grove to Hazel, to woo back her attention and affection by an important gift.

Hazel rather likes the idea of being a property owner, though she’s not much interested in the farming aspect of things – too much work, and Hazel is all about taking things as easy as possible - and when an itinerant, fatherless family shows up asking to rent the rundown shack in Hazel’s grove, she enters into an agreement with the Poole family to let them live in her grove in return for young Felder Poole’s assistance in bringing the damaged trees back into production.

Felder Poole is close in age to Hazel, but aside from this similarity he is everything that she is not. Extremely bright, fond of all sorts of learning, he is an accomplished autodidact with a talent and propensity for making things grow. Hazel is at first suspicious and then enthralled with Felder’s plans for the grove; she becomes fascinated with the whole Poole ménage, much to her father’s dismay.

For Millard Rye’s Great Big Issue – which is really part and parcel of Hazel’s Great Big Issue, too – is that he is so emotionally attached to his daughter that he can’t bear to share her with anyone else. As Hazel’s horizons widen with the entry of Felder and the rest of the Pooles into her life, she is continually confronted with her father’s veiled but genuinely deep jealousy, and rather than being flattered by his attachment to her as she has been in the past, is beginning to see that this is an emotionally unhealthy situation for the both of them.

Let me hasten to say that Millard’s interest in Hazel is purely filial; there is no shadow of anything improper in his attachment to her; Millard is also deeply attached to his “nervous” wife Ona, and yearns for her happiness, indulging her in every way possible, hence his willingness to send her off to her parents to regain her fragile equilibrium while Millard and Hazel keep the home fires burning. She’s definitely coming back; whatever the Ryes’ other issues, a permanently split and unhappy family life does not appear to be among them.

As Hazel becomes more and more interested in the orange grove, and in the inner workings of the happy, loving, poor-but-ambitious Poole family, she is moved to change her own life in various ways. The sudden and unexpected resolution of the story rather surprised me, as did Hazel’s reaction to it; a welcome situation for this old cynic where this particular juvenile genre is concerned. Actually, I shouldn’t say “resolution”, as there really isn’t one; Hazel is left poised for her next step as the curtain closes on this brief period in her life.

The language in the book, coming from a third person perspective, is unusual and unique, using what I can only assume is a local Florida dialect and its very distinctive phraseology. Husband-and-wife writing team Vera and Bill Cleaver already had a respectable number of well-reviewed juvenile novels to their credit when they came up with Hazel Rye, and regional emphasis and use of dialect was one of their specialities. (You may find the authors’ names familiar if you were in grade school in the 1970s, as their award-winning Appalachian novel, Where the Lilies Bloom, was ubiquitous in libraries and frequently used for novel study classes. I read it way back then, and remember it vaguely but with admiration; I will be seeking it out for an adult re-read.)

Hazel Rye pleased me. Though it belongs in a genre I frequently hold up to scorn, I happily admit that it was a gently diverting read. The serious themes - the “issues” - were treated with respect and common sense, and the book was jam-packed with good nature and understated humour. A novel perhaps best appreciated by more mature readers than the target identified by the publishers; I would think a lot of the more enjoyable aspects of the language and scenarios would fly right over the head of the typical grade-schooler, and the plot itself isn’t really strong enough to be memorable, among so many other books with much more dramatic storylines.

I wouldn’t suggest that anyone rush out an acquire this one – it’s a very minor story in a read-once-and-move-on sort of way - but if you or your bookish adolescent come across it in your library travels, I’d say that you should give it a go.

The novel is about a poor family who move from North Carolina to Chicago when they fall on hard times. Their fields are blighted, their pigs died and it seems like there's nothing left. So they pack up and move to the big city, hoping for work and better opportunities. Things don't go as planned. Jobs are hard to find, they are woefully ignorant of how things work in their new environment and soon after moving the two grown women in the family disappear. A bunch of little kids and one fourteen-year-old girl are left to fend for themselves with an incapacitated, blind father. At first they try to do things right, to find odd jobs, even apply for government aid- which never materializes. Finally they realize the hopelessness of their situation and follow the lead of a local kid they meet in the back alley, who guides the oldest boy and finally the teenage girl into thievery to survive. One bad thing follows another and finally the older girl realizes that the city is changing them, they are becoming hardened. She determines that something must change before it is too late.

More at the Dogear Diary

Where the lillies bloom is about this family that couldn't afford there own house. So they were farmers for a nasty old fellow named Kieser Piese. He was mean and demanding. But he was deeply in love with Roy Luthers oldest daughter Devola. She was sort of cloudy headed. she liked him because he had a yellow kitchen. but after a while Roy luther got very sick. He eventully passed away and Mary Call had to keep a promise to her father not to tell anyone about his passing. So she kept it up for a while then she eventuaally had to tell.
I like this nbook because it is adventurous and factual. it warns you how it is going to be when you grow up.

Where the Lilies Bloom is a mixture of happy and sad. It is about the Luther family struggling to live after their mother died. Things can't get worse, but they did. Their father is now dying. Mary Call, who is the second oldest of the children, made promises to keep everything going fine with him gone. Mary Call has to be in charge. That is going to be tough with an older sister who is cloudy-headed and two younger siblings. Mary Call ends up breaking some promises. Can she raise a family like this?

Where the Lilies Bloom

Where the lilies Bloom is about a Luther Family. Thiers Roy Luther, Cosby Luther, Mary Call Luther, and Devola Luther. Sadly Cosby died but is treasured and missed. It all started with one day... ....Roy Luther and all the kids went to go hunt. Roy Luther had a mild cold. They got back home and had a big dinner but similar to what they usually had. A week later Roy Luther was sicker than he was the week before. A guy named Kiser Pease came over and asked to speak with Roy Luther. Mary Call Politely let him in and let him speak to Roy Luther. He said that he wanted to marry Devola. He over excited Roy Luther and was forced to leave. Sadly Roy Luther died they buried him up on old Joshua. He lays there forever. Kaiser got sick and they rescued him by putting onions on him and washing him. They were rewarded by Kaiser giving their land back that he took. Mary Call promised Roy Luther that she would never let Kiser Pease marry Devola. She had to keep Roy Luther's death a secret or Kaiser would send them to an orphanage and he would marry Devola. Devola was in to Kaiser as well. Well Kaiser gives them a car because of they told a lie that Roy Luther wanted to sit in it. Mary Call found an old book that Cosby had and on the cover it said Wild Crafting. Mary Call made a great wild crafter just like her mother. Kaiser went to go and take Devola to get her license. While they were out Kaiser was hit by a truck and was sent to a hospital. When Kaiser was in the hospital his mean sister Goldie Pease Came by. She said that the contract Kaiser signed was worthless. Mary Call went to the hospital and asked Kaiser to marry her so that she could pretty much use him. He said NO!!! The secret accidently came out and she ran home crying. She came home and Kaiser and Devola were sitting at the table and told Mary Call they were going to get married. Devola surprisingly became smarter from begging to end. And that's Where the Lilies Bloom.

this wonderful book is about a girl named marycall and her siblings. They get into trouble with Kiser Pease and Goldie Pease with the paper saying that they will not be share-cropping anymore. andMarycall shows them the paper but they all knew it was useless. Even though Marycall has promised roy luther(their father)that Devola would not marry Kiser Pease MaryCall lets her anyway because Devola has changed.

Where the Lilies Bloom is a book on the Luther family and what happened to them. First tragedy is Crosby Luther dies. Second Roy Luther can’t pay taxes, so Kisser Pease pays the taxes and gets Roy Luther’s land. But Kisser Pease lets the Luther family share crop and let them keep their house. Unfortunately Roy Luther gets sick and Marry Call, Devola, Rommey and Ima Dean have to take care of him. Still Roy Luther dies (NOOOOOO). Marry Call has to take the place of Roy Luther, has to take care of the hole family. I almost forgot to tell you that Marry Call is only fourteen. Also they have to keep that Roy Luther is died because they would be separated in orphanages. In the end everyone knows that Roy Luther is died but Kisser Pease gave them the land, officially, and became their guardian but let them be, as they wanted to be. Kisser Pease married Devola as they both wanted.

I recommend this book. You should read it because it gets you interested to see what will happen next.