All I can say is that I’m a little miffed that I did not beat Sarah Thyre to the punch and write my own memoir of growing up in the South, and in particular, Louisiana. After all, I, too, was born into a peculiar, quirky Catholic family and attended a parochial school also named Our Lady of Prompt Succor (although in a different city) run by sadistic, hirsute Cajun nuns who mastered corporal punishment. I hunted and trapped nutria in bayous and witnessed their hides being flayed from their carcasses, although performed by my brother, not a hayseed boyfriend with a cruel streak. My family often shopped at a convenience store not unlike Pic-a-Pac replete with a cast of colorful characters with IQs matching their inseam measurements. I could go on an on.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about the hilarious, poignant and sometimes shocking adventures of a young, tenacious and sometimes truth-bending girl growing up in a large Catholic family in the Deep South. The writing is crisp and clear as Abita Springs artesian water, and each word is deftly chosen to perfectly capture experiences as seen through the eyes of a young person thrust into an idiosyncratic foreign land—much like Waveland, Mississippi—determined to rise out of the squalor and mediocrity that is endemic to so many families in the state known as Sportsman’s Paradise.
I found myself laughing out loud not only at the bizarre quandries in which the author and her siblings found themselves trapped, but at the language used to bring these situations into full 1970s Technicolor t.v. brilliance, with a heaping fistful of rabbit-eared antennae static.
If you are looking for one of those rare reads that you just cannot put down until the last page is turned with Cheeto-orange stained fingers, Dark at the Roots is one of those rare gems...or rhinestones, depending on where you do your shopping.
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