Authors: Barbara Holland

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Publisher: Harvest Books ((02 June, 1999))

Reviews

Great Writing Ability, However This Holland Book Has Some Problems

After reading Barbara Holland's "When All the World Was Young", which I absolutely adored, I immediately had to order another of her books. I must say I was not nearly as enamored of this story. I will say I still think she is a gifted writer. Many of her descriptions are a joy to read. However, I had a couple of problems with this story. First, there actually is little story here. In a few places, the long description of the dedication of the new post office comes to mind, it became so mind-numbingly boring that I skipped ahead a few pages. Second, I became a little confused and frankly less than sympathtic to the main character, Barbara. If she so hates the winters in the mountain, why does she stay there? It's obvious she is miserable much of the year. Also, why live in a rural area where "everyone knows you business" and privacy is, in fact, harder to come by than in the big city, if you are a loner at heart (which she obviously is.) Where are her children? Grown now, but why does she never see them, so it seems, and practically never even mentions them. Finally, I found her criticism of the families in the new subdivisions to be a bit cruel. When I read "When All the World Was Young", I found it to be a delightful journey back to the 1950's, the same time I grew up. But in reading "Bingo Night", which takes place in contemporary times, I began to feel that Ms Holland, in fact, would be happier living in the past. As people grow older, some of us adapt to change better than others. Ms Holland's obvious discontent with modern life in American today suggests that she does not adapt well to change. I so loved the other book! I wish she would give fiction a try, she is such an amazing writer, but I'll not read any more of her nonfiction stories.

Ruminations from the rural/suburban interface

During the 1700s and 1800s, as the burgeoning population of the White Man, backed by his relatively sophisticated farming methods and industrial capacity, slowly encroached upon and suffocated the Native American cultures, there must have been those writers who bemoaned the passing of the Noble Savage and his way of life. Here, in BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL, Barbara Holland, at the interface of vanishing rural, small-farm America and metastasizing, mall-happy suburbia, performs the same function. The place is northern Virginia, less than an hour's drive west of Dulles International. Barbara places herself in a mountain cabin inherited from her mother near the village of Pikestown, a short distance from North Hill, at a gap in the Appalachians. After determined inspection of a Rand McNally, I can state with some degree of certainty that these are fictional place names. I suspect her point of view to emanate from somewhere in the Front Royal-Chester Gap-Sperryville arc. The time is the mid-1990s, and Holland herself is perhaps in her 60s. Those readers who enjoyed [[ASIN:006095647X Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences]] and [[ASIN:015601176X Wasn't the Grass Greener?: Thirty-three Reasons Why Life Isn't as Good as It Used to Be]] are acquainted with the author's style, which is similar to that of the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney, but without the mean streak. But while the other two volumes deal with specifics, BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL concerns itself with a way of life, a more nebulous concept, that otherwise gets lost in the mundane details of everyday living. This life, represented by family farms, local general stores, town meetings, bingo nights, a deeply felt Civil War heritage, local fund-raisers, school Christmas pageants, clean-cut and drug-free adolescents, and an environment where everyone knows everybody else, is giving way to the impersonal, stressed-out, multicultural, politically correct, acquisitive, self-centered and insidiously spreading suburbia created by the maturing post-war Baby Boomers and their spawn. And Barbara, a former big city dweller herself, observes this transition creeping over the ridgeline into her own back yard, and hints at a loss of deeper, traditional values. This book is unlikely to appeal to the young or middle aged, but to those older who are simply getting old and marginalized. This fact doesn't invalidate Barbara's observations, but rather makes them irrelevant to the newest generations, who will, in time, have their own turn at disenchantment.

A continuous page turning story

I am not much of a reader. As usual I was fumbling through the book store on one of those boring family vacations and fell into this book. I could not seem to put it down. This book was very well written and I plan to read all of Barbara Hollands books she is a very creative writer and I would recommend any of her books ( even though I have only read this one ) to anyone.

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