Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

I absentmindedly snagged this at the bookstore to carry with me on a road trip thinking nothing of it, but this definitely rose to the top!

It has a beautiful balance of humor and heartbreak and all of the characters are so incredibly diverse with their own unique flaws and personalities that makes them feel real. As someone born and raised in the south, this book really did feel like home and it made me miss not only the sense of community, but my grandmother's fried grits patties that her mom used to make during the Great Depression. Fannie Flagg's effortless imagery and seamless chronology is something to revel in, and I truly enjoyed the Weems Weekly as a nice "buffer" between the four varying perspectives. The way Fannie Flagg made each perspective have their own individual "voice" just sucked me into the story even more, and I found myself rooting for all of the different characters. I adored Ninny's rambling and eccentric nature, Evelyn's struggles through her midlife crisis, Sipsey's no nonsense kindness, Smokey's somber life, Eva's independence, and Idgie and Ruth's wholehearted devotion to one another.

This book doesn't stray from the hard truths of southern history, but it also highlighted the individual efforts to get through tough times and how a community banded together in hopes of transforming the Whistlestop Cafe into a haven for all. The language is hard to read and, at times a lot of the topics included are uncomfortable to witness, but as someone who's parents, grandparents, and so on and so forth were raised in a town similar depicted to this one, it's eerily accurate

- from the normalized age gaps in relationships (specifically Idgie and Ruth's comes to mind), depictions of domestic violence between Ruth and her husband, prostitution and it's stigmatization, how the different skin colors of Artis and Jasper shaped how people treated them and thus their futures, normalized microaggressions, train accidents (from the outside looking in, seems way left field but my grandmother's town has a strip that, to this day, is called "the death loop"), casual racist vernacular in conversation, the "white savior" mentality of the Threadgoodes, Judeo-Christian undertones, even down to the tradition of stopping the clocks and covering the mirrors in death to "let the spirit go" and not be trapped in the land of the living.

However, it's important to acknowledge these details and these various mentalities instead of watering them down any more than Flagg already had because they are very real and were prominent at this time.

In all honestly, there really is so much to unpack and I really do recommend this for anyone missing "home," looking for representation, feeling stuck in the middle of a midlife crisis, or just hoping for a good story.

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