This book, "Miss Jane" is deceptively brilliant. It seems to be a simple story but it isn't. You forget how good the writing is because it doesn't pretend to be poetic or overly generous. It is so honest and so true and remarkable that it's easy to think it's just a small novel about farmers in the Depression. It is anything but that.
Jane Chisolm is born to a family of stubborn, hard-working farmers in Mississippi in the early twentieth century. She has a physical abnormality that shapes her life and defines her in many ways but she truly owns who she is. The story is as much about farm life as it is about the lives on that farm. "There was the bustling of the noon dinner meal when her father came in, ate, then went back out to work, the clanking and scrubbing of cleaning up, the long hot still afternoon, her joy at Grace's arrival home from school, then preparation for supper, and finally the rustling descent of quiet voices and bodies slowing into the evening until everyone slept."
I loved Jane, with her necessary pragmatic vision of her world, her longing for something she can never have, her resignation that her life, as complicated as it was, was at the same time as simple as it could be. Her father, her sister Grace, her mother, the town doctor, they are all drawn so clearly and so perfectly. It's been a while since I liked a book as much as this one. There is something about Watson's telling of the story that hooked me and didn't let me go. I hated to see it end.
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