A review by buggy1313
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Fried Green Tomatoes is one of my all time favorite movies and I have been wanting to read the book for it for a long time. 
I can say this is maybe the first instance where the movie is better than the book. 
I don’t know how someone read this book and saw the potential for a movie to be made out of it… 

This book was all over the place and hard to keep up with. We went back and forth through so many time periods and have way too many POVs and storylines that were unnecessary and added nothing to the plot or story. 
We would bring up a plot line randomly and then totally forget about it until 20 chapters later where we focused on it more. 

I had a problem with the character of Ninny and the language she used and thoughts that she had which seemed to emulate the authors own thoughts. Still using the word colored and n word for the 1980’s portion of the book? That seems like outdated language for the 80’s. Also actually saying the slurs for Japanese and Chinese people and using the derogatory term for little people and how she always wanted a little person to come and sit on her lap and play with him (wtf?). Saying how weird it is that “colored” people come in so many different shades. The author using the R word to describe Ninny’s mentally challenged son.

The character of Evelyn says that her alter ego, Towanda, wants to blow up the Middle East. Compares sexism to racism which should not be compared to each other as being the same at all. Saying she wished she was black and Ninny saying “oh, god why would you want to be black be glad the good lord made you white.”….:.

This whole book also seemed like Christian/Religious propaganda especially when it came to the character of Ninny and it got very old very quickly. 

The writing at times seemed bad and not very well thought out or written. We often had the read things over twice. Ninny would tell part of the story to Evelyn and then we would have to hear that same part of the story again as it had happened in the next chapter. Often times the author rushed through big plot points of the story such as the trial of Big George and Idgie and Ruth, one of the main characters being diagnosed with cancer and dying. I also felt Ruth and Idgie’s relationship wasn’t explored as much as it should have been and I wish there was more scenes with them.

I wished I had liked this better but there were things I just couldn’t look away from.