Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Jan 12, 2010

Melody rated it:

Carson McCullers was an author who used her writing to search for God and to explore her own questions about sexual identity. In The Member of the Wedding her main character, who is called Frankie, turns 12 and begins to try to figure out how she is going to navigate her way around this big old lonely world. Will she do it with a “crew-cut”, wearing a Mexican hat and with “rusty elbows”, or will she seek adventure in exotic places with “Esquimaux” by train in silver slippers with her hair in c More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 18, 2007

Susan rated it:

Enjoyed:
--WWII time period
--Berenice, the black housekeeper who is a storyteller and surrogate mother to the adolescent protagonist
--Descriptions of Southern food (eaten in kitchen, where much of the action transpires)
--The threesome of the adult female black housekeeper, the adolescent girl, and the six-year-old boy cousin, as a group
--brevity of book

Warmed up to:
--Slow pace of book, which was more difficult in the early part of the book
--So More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 03, 2011

Mariel rated it:

Float 'cause the hos are getting out of line! They need a 'fro.

Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding is my unrequited love story in my stable of hos: those lyrically intimate classical works I've read that stayed with me because they were confiders of sorts, someones I could go to and find some sort of explanation inside, a relating that was more than good enough of itself. (And I get my belt when they don't put out for me.) (I don't wanna say cathartic because this book isn't More...

2 comments like (15 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2007

Rebecca rated it:

Such a vivid, cruel when necessary, and yet unhysterical account of a 12 & 5/6th year old girl. She's filled with intense emotions that she doesn't have names for, eagerness, desperation. This is a book that describes how it feels to be this person--how it feels to be a smart girl somewhere in the mush between kid and adult, engaging in adult ideas but with a child's facility. McCullers is brave, she doesn't shy away from the horror of being alive, and yet never loses her warmth.

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 30, 2011

Dominic rated it:

The Member of the Wedding continues in the tradition of Carson McCullers' breakthrough novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a book that I can't seem to shake out of my system (and love more every time I think about it). In this short novel, Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances is another McCullers misfit, this time a pre-adolescent girl whose dreams are too big for her small town and her small world.

While the plot isn't extraordinarily complex (basically it's the story of one lazy summer when F More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 11, 2009

Maralise rated it:

A fantastic explication of what 'crazy' feels like. McCullers nails loneliness. Again.

For me, even more than in 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,' the characters reveal their skeletons in a way that doesn't separate you from their pain, but instead forces you to stare in gawky horror at the similarities between yourself and them.

And yet, McCullers also manages to allow the reader to hope, to think of the future, to imagine a world where wounds are healed and scars start More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 18, 2007

Shawna rated it:

I am more partial to this book more than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (another book by McCullers). There is one main character you are concerned about and they story is simple, despite this the characters had depth and I was able to relate and ponder on human nature. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had many interweaving storylines and though I was given a dizzying high from contemplating the great social problems plaguing the last century I prefer focusing on the individual and the how’s and why’ More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 25, 2009

Karen rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like

May 29, 2011

KJ rated it:

An achingly sad coming-of-age story about 12-year-old F. Jasmine Addams who just wants to belong. Her mother died when she was born, her best friend has moved away, and now her brother is getting married and moving, too. Her only friend in the world is her six-year-old cousin John Henry. She convinces herself that being a member of the wedding means her brother and new sister-in-law will take her away. She feels caught in her dull life and yearns to escape.

Midway through this shor More...

0 comments like

Feb 06, 2011

Jason rated it:

There is a lot to admire in this short novel about a young girl coming of age in a small southern town, starting with the ways in which this character at the cusp of adolescence is continually tricking herself into believing something foolish, blindly ignoring criticism. The characters of Bernice and John Henry are also wonderfully rendered. What doesn't carry as much is the narration, unsure, as it is, whether to constrain itself to what its protagonist knows (which it sometimes does) or to exp More...

0 comments like

Oct 14, 2010

Kelsey rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Mar 05, 2010

Emma rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 10, 2010

Barb rated it:

the 4 star rating is for the brilliant way this book is written, for it being a superb character study - not for how fun it was to read. parts of it should be required reading for middle schoolers, esp those students who feel so different from others and out of place in their world - then to tell those tweeners that this was written in 1946!

examples: frankie goes to the side show at a carnival; "she was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her More...

0 comments like

Aug 01, 2009

Sandra rated it:

This coming of age story was dark, funny, sad, a really great read. McCullers takes her time to tell the story of Frankie, a twelve year old girl who knows how to handle a pistol and throw knives. She's pissed off, but she doesn't know why. She becomes obsessed with her brother's wedding, and tells everyone that she is not coming back to town after the wedding, that she plans on leaving with the couple to their honeymoon.

The novella is told in three parts, the longest of which is on More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 21, 2009

Adele rated it:

Before picking up The Member of the Wedding, I'd only read one other work of McCullers-- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. While the latter is the best title (ever) The Member of the Wedding is a better story to my mind. Frankie is a character I easily recognized and have identified with since I started reading: a twelve year old girl in a hurry to grow up. Frankie is a motherless tomboy, brave, reckless, and harboring delusions of her own grandeur. When she finds out her brother's getting marri More...

0 comments like

Feb 25, 2011

Joe rated it:

Superb and deeply affecting portrait of a 12-year-old girl going through the crisis of puberty. Frankie feels as alienated and misunderstood as a young girl can, and her anxious terror as she waits to board the (wedding) train to adulthood is palpable McCullers' vivid realism.

What I found most fascinating was my conflicting sympathy and doubt about Frankie. Is her selfishness and meanness a natural, inevitable phase, or has she already been corrupted by unhappy forces that will lead More...

0 comments like

Apr 28, 2010

Frank rated it:

Terrific, this is easily the best of hers that I've read. Wonderful evocation of a sensitive tomboy at the brink of puberty. Whimsical, funny and touching. Not as over the top as Reflections in a Golden Eye or as melodramatic and slightly contrived as Ballad of the Sad Cafe. (And not as saccharine as Capote's The Grass Harp.) A great minor masterpiece.

Possibly of some interest for Dutch readers (at least it was for this Dutch reader) is the title and its pun on club memberships, evid More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 30, 2010

Anita rated it:

Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding is such a strange little book. I loved some parts and didn’t love other parts. It revolves around Frankie Addams, who is twelve and a half years old. For me this was a really significant age, and I think the book does a great job of encapsulating the feelings and experiences associated with that age: Frankie’s no longer a child, yet she’s not yet a woman. She feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere, and she’s trying to figure out who she is and w More...

0 comments like

Oct 27, 2011

Samantha rated it:

In The Member of the Wedding, the main character Frankie is a twelve year old girl who becomes obsessed with her brother, Jarvis, getting married. She spends most of the her time in the novel telling Bernice and John Henry about her scheme to move with Jarvis and his young bride Janice and how they would be so happy for her to come live with them. Just the three of them. The short play doesn't really take long to get through and only has one climatic scene which is where Frankie decides to tell More...

0 comments like

Jul 29, 2010

Alison rated it:

Short novel about a twelve-year-old overgrown and slightly sadistic tomboy named Frankie who lives with her father (her mom died in childbirth) and spends most of her time with her six-year-old cousin, John Henry, and her housekeeper/nanney Berenice in their small Southern town. The summer of Frankie's twelfth year is spent playing cards at the kitchen table, feeling angry and scared, but mainly lonely.

Frankie's brother Jarvis is in town to get married, and Frankie sees this as a wa More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 27, 2009

Jen rated it:

Let me just say up-front that I read McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was in 10th grade, for English class with the best English teacher I had ever, including in college. And I loved it. With all of my heart. I've read that book over and over, and I even wrote a curriculum unit on it when I was in college for secondary education. Interestingly, I haven't read that many of her other books. I got The Member of the Wedding for free off of BookMooch, and I decided to do this crazy More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 23, 2009

Rob rated it:

I was hesitant to read this book even though I loved the author's other book--Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and had one of my best teaching experiences with it. But N.P.R. reviewed Member of the Wedding--this past summer. So fortunately I gave it a try. This slim book is marvelous, lyrical, and full of imaginative depth. Yes, it is a young girl's coming of age story, but it still appealed to me a middle-aged male. I couldn't put this book down. Think of an adolescent Scout Finch... Think of a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2009

Kevin rated it:

A born complainer, I can better tell you what an author does wrong than what she does right. So with this book I am at something of a loss for words.
McCullers does one thing right that everybody else in the whole fucking world seems to get wrong all the fucking time, that is to say she creates a compelling child character. Child characters in other books tend to be vehicles for sentimentality and boogers. Frankie however is keenly felt in all aspects: her nascent sexuality, repressed by he More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 04, 2011

Jennifer (JC-S) rated it:

‘I wish I was somebody else except me.’

It’s August 1944, and Frankie (Frances) Addams is a twelve-year-old girl living in the American south. Frankie is frustrated and bored, she feels like she no longer belongs. ‘This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.’ Frankie’s best friend, Evelyn Owen, left town before summer began, and most of the other girls are already thirteen and won’t allow her to be a member of their club. The novel opens in the kitchen of Fra More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2011

Jessie rated it:

McCullers makes writing fiction contagious; I finished her book fueled to launch back into the story I’m working on, which is completely unrelated to her work in theme, though not in region. Can’t believe I’ve only just met Carson McCullers!

The lazy summer kitchen meals shared by Frankie (F. Jasmine rather), John Henry & Berenice are my favorite moments in this book. “It was the hour when the shapes in the kitchen darkened and voices bloomed.” (563) I can feel the lull, smell the fo More...

0 comments like

Feb 19, 2010

Rachel rated it:

I don't think I've read a book that better epitomizes the strangeness of 'growing up.' Spanning just over two days and squished into about 160 pages, the narrative is quite literally made up of intensely concentrated teen confusion and crazy. 12-year-old protagonist Frankie is written as a living manifestation of every insecurity a child could possibly experience as she develops an awareness of herself in relation to other people and what exactly it means to be connected with humanity. Other cha More...

0 comments like

Jun 08, 2009

Dave rated it:

McCullers tones down her scope from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to take a penetrating look at a Mick Kelly type character. Frankie Addams has many parallels to Heart's lovable teenage tomboy, down to the inclination towards hero-worship and a penchant for dramatic self-destruction. What makes The Member of the Wedding different is Frankie's deeper descent into a world of dark desires unnameable and unknowable to her twelve-year-old mind. Frankie wants desperately to connect to anything, to be n More...

0 comments like

Nov 16, 2010

kaitlyn rated it:

I really loved the beginning of this book. McCullers has such a way of describing feelings that so often feel indescribable. She nailed emptiness, loneliness, longing right on the head and shows you what it feels like to be a person. And all that with a twelve-year-old protagonist.

Some good ones:

Frankie stood looking into the sky. For when the old question came to her—the who she was and what she would be in the world, and why she was standing there that minute—when the old More...

0 comments like

Oct 11, 2011

Anne (Booklady) rated it:

When I read Carson McCullers my minds eye is actually watching a Tennessee William’s play.
“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.
This was a summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She
belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had
become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”

Frances (Frankie) Addams is at the age where she is mo More...

0 comments like

Oct 18, 2010

Carly rated it:

This book is on a par with A Catcher in the Rye in my opinion. Although I found it much easier to identify with this book than with Catcher, maybe because I am a woman? Is it because this writer is a woman that it is so overlooked?I had to read A Catcher in the Rye four times before I finally realised how good it is.

McCullers' description of a child in that most awful stage between childhood and fully fledged teenagerhood is the best I have read. That desperate, selfish desire to f More...

0 comments like

reviews