The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio
How my mother raised 10 kids on 25 words or less…
This book caught my attention through the recommendation of a friend. I approached it cautiously, knowing that this particular friend loves stories full of pablum and sap. It turns out I was right to do so, as this book tends to beat you about the neck and head with it’s “message”. On occasion I had to put it down and walk away, thinking “we get it, we get it, she survived by her wit and still raised ten kids in the face of her husband’s alcoholism – enough already!”
This book reads as if more than one writer wrote it – at times mellifluous and at times pedestrian. I got the feeling throughout that parts were heavily edited by a third party and the writer never went back to make sure the “voice” of the piece was still their own. Heavy editing can kill a book’s flow if it isn’t written consistently with the tone of the book as a whole.
The most interesting aspect of the book for me was a glimpse into the lives of women in the era of “contesting”. Writing the advertising jingles for various companies kept more than one woman both sane and afloat in a time when options were few for women in general. Unable to work outside the home with as much freedom and choice as women can today, they seized this chance to be creative, to use their intellect and to make some money and earn much needed things for their children and homes.
One of the other flaws in this book was a tendency to drop characters. I hoped to read much more about the other contesters. The storyline of the bedridden contester was dropped all too quickly, for example. I was genuinely curious to know more about her fight against polio and how she got into contesting in the first place. Perhaps that’s an indirect way of saying I simply was not as drawn to the main character as I should have been.
The fact that I think of these real life women as characters, even knowing this is a non-fiction book, is a red flag that the development of the story didn’t ring true for me. It stayed on the surface, never delving into the simmering emotions and issues behind the piece. This book would have made a much better screenplay, and in fact has been made into a movie. I can tell you that I plan to see the movie because I believe that seeing the book acted out may give it the depth it lacked in the writing.
Recommended
Not really – I’d skip the torture of the heavy handed book and see the movie
Hire Me On 
