Betty: The International Bestseller

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This is the story of Betty Carpenter and her family as they move from place to place until they finally settle in Breathed, Ohio on the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.

With Mom’s story, we’re looking at her journey through the lens of race but also of gender. She talked about being in school during career fairs, and the teachers saying, “You’re not going to do anything with your life so you might as well just sit this out.” There was this idea, especially ingrained in those small towns, that if you weren’t white then you were somehow less significant or less intelligent. I also wanted to see this story through the lens of Landon and Betty’s relationship, and how he helped her find a path forward despite the bullying she got over the color of her skin. Betty is a story based on the author’s mother’s life. It’s written in first person with Betty narrating. She shares the earliest history of both her parents, and then takes us through the family’s life as her siblings are born, before and after she is born, and up through the years as she comes-of-age. Funny how the night makes everything so spooky,” she said as a gust of wind came and seemed to rattle the ground. Alka and Landon have eight children: Leland, Fraya, Yarrow, Waconda, Flossie, Betty, Trustin and Lint. Yarrow and Waconda died before they were two. Betty’s story is centered around her and her sisters Fraya and Flossie. They father told her:McDaniel: I’m very fair-skinned, so it’s important to separate my experiences from those of my mother and grandfather. My own experiences haven’t had that sort of violence attached to them. I don’t know what it’s like to experience racism. I came of age in predominantly white communities, so I fit in. Mom really struggled. Growing up, people would ask if she was my real mother because of the difference in our skin colors.

Guernica: I love how nature and the human spirit are intertwined throughout the story. The description and comparisons are so rich and lush.

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mcdaniel has excellent control of the narrative, handling foreshadowing and discovery like a boss, and making you care about (almost) every member of this family, even at their least sympathetic. It was such a pleasure reading about him. Everything he taught his kids, his stories. I just- *sniffles* – love him so much. Guernica: It seems like Betty also finds relief in her own writing, because of how it allows her to escape from life while recording it. It reminds me of how her father feels about the stories he tells.

It’d be so much easier if the bad things in our lives were kept in our skin that we could shed off like a snake. Then we could leave all the dried horrid things on the ground and step forward, free from them. McDaniel’s book is very firmly set in the 80s: Fielding gets his first kiss while watching ET, his older brother Grand is haunted by the threat of Aids. Starting in 1984, a year before McDaniel was born, she says the era “felt like a decade-long summer – it was bright, big hair, big ambitions. So I took the heat of that decade and applied it to the heat in the story.” The novel is peppered with small references to her own upbringing – her family, like her characters, say “winda” instead of window, she says. But the religious fervour and the discrimination are products of keen observation from her childhood. The instances of racism and homophobia are at times pure venom, while some are benignly sanctimonious. “Like my momma used to say, when you play in thorns, you ain’t gonna get nothin’ but scratched,” one character mildly muses about Aids.At the end of the book, I felt totally exhausted, but I’m so glad that I read this. What a wonderful, but difficult read! I have never read anything like it. Perhaps in this picture she is on the verge of imagining a different future. At the very least, a place different than the hell she had come from. Over time I also heard things like, “Tiffany, never publish under your name, your name is too fluffy, it’s too female.” I considered only using my initials, but then I’d be part of the problem, not part of the solution. I think we need to view women’s names as powerful! When The Summer That Melted Everything came out, people asked me why I was frowning in the author photo. That was about the fourth or fifth photo I had to take. In the first photo I wasn’t approachable enough; in another I was told I looked too young and wouldn’t be taken seriously, while another photo made me look too standoffish. There is still this way we’re viewing women: unless [women] look a certain way or talk a certain way or write a certain way, we won’t appeal to the audience as a whole. There’s a lot we have to do to make it an equal playing field. The last thing I want to praise is McDaniel's voice. Her style is lyrical and beautiful, but also very forward. Jamie Ford, New York Timesbestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweetand Love and Other Consolation Prizes

In this atmospheric Appalachian Gothic, a poet and novelist draws on a string of actual unsolved murders in her native Ohio to capture what goes horribly wrong when women don’t fit a customary victim profile... McDaniel artfully evokes each facet of their common humanity, the sinuous landscape, and defiant community in the face of evil." There's a good chance you haven't read a family saga like Betty... Their story is simultaneously extraordinary (they are subjected to unthinkable racism, financial hardships, and untimely deaths) and run-of-the-mill (at the heart, they are a family like any other). Each day in their life is supplanted with the mysticism and interconnectedness of their father's traditions, offering a light at the end of a very dark plot tunnel.' - Entertainment Weekly Someone important. You know why I call you Little Indian? So that you know you’re already someone important.” Only Betty’s father offers an escape from the pain of everyday existence. He tells her beautiful stories about Ohio’s wildlife, their Cherokee heritage, and the family’s ancestry, which captivate both Betty and the reader. Landon has such a gift for animating nature that he makes his audience appreciate every mound of dirt, seedling, and living creature. As he tells Betty, “We bring the earth inside us and restore the knowledge that even the smallest leaf has a soul.” For Landon, the earth connects us to our upbringings, to the generations that came before us, and to the people we’ve loved and lost. Throughout this book, we see how prejudice harms communities, and how dreamlike beauty can exist alongside unbearable pain. McDaniel writes this heartbreaking story with elegance and grace, vividly evoking the mystical relationship between people and the landscape, and the tenderness between father and daughter. When I was a kid, I was often by the side of my grandmother, Mamaw Alka. As a child, it was difficult to understand how one minute she could be loving and kind, while the next she could be distant and hard to reach. Once I learned about the abuse she experienced, I understood how it shaped her into the woman she was.

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel – Highly recommended

I wanted to merge my myths with Papaw’s,” McDaniel said. “It’s through story that I feel most connected to him.” Landon (both real and fictional) tells stories to strengthen his family; McDaniel wrote “Betty” to honor hers. Narrated by the deceased Arc, McDaniel’s novel is by turns stark and poetic, a bleak and solemn elegy to lives that in another place and time might have been lived on the beautiful side. It’s also a tale of a nation unraveling, drowning in rivers of hopelessness and drug addiction.” It’s hanging’ in there from a sweet little string. Within the glass is the bird God caught all the way up in heaven.’ Betty is woven of many things, light and dark, and most of all it is life in all its shades: all its brilliances and disappointments, sadnesses and hopes. Vivid and lucid, Betty has stayed with me.' - Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies Isn’t this what parenthood is all about? Steadying feet and hanging lanterns along the path to adulthood?