Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani is set in small town America in the 1970s – a small town that Elizabeth Taylor is going to visit. Ave Maria is over thirty and unmarried. Her life is in a bit of a rut. She owns a pharmacist store, works with the local emergency services and suddenly finds out, when her mother dies, that the man that she thinks is her father is not her birth father. This news causes Ave Maria to reconsider lots of things about her life and to make some big changes.
This town is filled with quirky characters and Ave Maria is perfectly accepting of their differences but when the town finds out that she is different they can’t all accept it. Ave Maria now has two suitors and a family feud to negotiate but she decides to trace her birth father and anticipates leaving the town where she has lived all her life.
I confess that I found this book a bit tiring, possibly because it is quite long and I didn’t feel that all the content was needed to tell the story – I thought that maybe the author was so in love with this town of her creation that she wanted to write more about it and consequently she invented lots of minor characters and sub-plots which didn’t necessarily add anything to the main story. The quirkiness of the minor characters became wearing and they weren’t very realistic. I also found Ave Maria very capricious – many of her life changing decisions were made on a whim and some of them didn’t make a lot of sense. The book has a feeling of whimsey and occasional magic which also made it unbelievable but which did help resolve issues in the plot.
This is a very popular book, I read it because of a positive review which recommended it, and there are now other stories in a series following the future events in the life of Ave Maria and the town. I didn’t hate this book but I won’t be reading the sequels.
Anne Is Reading 