Infected Loser Book Review of Whistling Past the Graveyard

I got a copy of Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall through Netgalley and I kept putting off reading it. I’m not really sure why I put it off but I did and then finally I said enough was enough and got down to reading it. I am pretty glad that I did. Although I give the book a 3.5 star rating it doesn’t mean that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy reading it. I loved the characters, I felt for Starla and Eula with every hardship that they came across and had been through.

I’m always fascinated with books that are set in the 60′s and during the segregation because I like how people rise up regardless of the situation that is handed to them forcefully.
Starla is a 9 year old girl who has to live with her grandmother because her dad has to work a long ways away and her mom ran off to get famous. Her Mamie isn’t the best there is and says a lot of mean and hurtful things to her. Finally Starla had enough and she ran away from home. She thinks she is going to walk all the way to Nashville from Mississippi funnily enough. A couple hours into her running away she think she’s going to die of thirst of die from buzzards. She’s a strong girl but still 9 years old and has a funny imagination. She is very driven with her running away to go to Nashville and live with her Mom.

The ending was awesome…

When Eula came along in her beat up truck she offered Starla some water and the real story then begins. Eula has a white baby sitting in the truck and Eula is a colored woman which means, of course, the baby doesn’t belong to her and she shouldn’t have the baby. When they get to Eula’s house we meet Wallace, which is Eula’s husband and he is furious that she has a white baby and a white child with her, that she kidnapped a white baby. He’s a real jerk of a guy who shoves Eula around and I just didn’t like him in the slightest. While reading it though, he has no redeeming qualities, he’s supposed to be hated. He gets what is coming to him though which is good.

When Starla, Eula and baby James have to hit the road you come across a wide variety of jerks and nice people. You meet Miss Cyrena which helps them out when they are really down. It shows you that there are good and bad in the world but you always need to look for that good and not focus on just the bad.

As you can imagine, during that time was a pretty horrible time for colored people because they were trying to get their civil rights and be equal and a lot of white people didn’t like it. There is a lot of instances to that in the book and my heart broke with every single one of them.

The only problem I had with this book was the pacing. I felt that it was pretty slow in some spots and it seemed to drag on but the parts that didn’t make me feel like that, they more than made up for it.

The ending was awesome and I wouldn’t have changed a thing about it.

Quotes I Liked
“It might be better to take James with me, but babies were probably particular tasty to bears and whatnot”

“Sometimes laughin’ is all a body can do, child. It’s laugh or lose your mind.”

“Change doesn’t come without struggle.”

“Some of the best things in life come when you’re not planning on them. It’s important to see them for the gift they are.”