If it is true that laughter is the best medicine, then Rita Mae Brown's, BINGO, will cure anything. I laughed so hard! The small southern town of Runnymede, Maryland, is split down the middle by the Mason-Dixon line. The war between the states is still being played out, and how could it not be?! In trouble with the law in the South? Run north across Town Square and you're free of that jurisdiction. Two sheriff's, two city halls; hilarious!
Nickel Smith is often (always) smack-in-the-middle of her mother and aunts' outrageous sisterly competitiveness. And I do mean outrageous. One of my favorite examples is when her nearly ninety-year-old aunt, Louise, sometimes called Aunt Wheezie, wears falsies when competing with her sister, Julia, sometimes called Juts, for the attention of a newly arrived, available, Ed Tutweiler Walters. The antics these octogenarians pulled were not befitting their age and made me forget mine as this sort of funny is ageless!!
Nickel is a newspaper journalist, born and breed. When the town's only newspaper, the Clarion, is sold out from under her feet her world seems to be crumbling down around her. But, with the help of friends and happenstance, the Mercury newspaper is established giving Nickel her much-needed newspaper job, and the town an opposing daily.
This book was published in 1989, before being gay was a fad. Back when coming out of the closet could close a lot of doors. Yet, the main character, Nickel, is a proud publicly professed lesbian, amongst other well-rounded qualities culminating in a well developed, fascinating main character, surrounded by a family and town of "characters". Funny, funny, funny.
A friend loaned me this book. Guess I will have to give it back.
