Book Review: I Love You, Miss Huddleston

This book happened to catch my eye on the library shelf because of the goofy picture on the cover. Upon further inspection, I found that the author is from Indiana. It's a memoir of the childhood of Phillip Gulley.

I assumed that this would reassemble the writings of David Sedaris; mostly true and funny. But while the book had the word "inappropriate" in the subtitle, it was barely a pg rating on the scale. After reading a few chapters, I flipped to the back cover to the author's bio. He's a Quaker pastor.

What?

All hope of funny vanished.

I kept on reading, however, to the end. Not every book I read has to be funny. I just happened to have gotten the wrong impression.

One summer his father got 100 tomato plants and their family had more tomatoes than they knew what to do with. Even eating them with all three meals a day, there was still too many tomatoes. His dad brought home canning jars so that they could preserve the over abundance of tomatoes. His mother, absolutely sick of them, secretly hid the jars.

Naughty! Inappropriate!

Don't get me wrong - Gulley is a good writer and he tells his stories well. The problem is that they resemble a long-winded story being told ever so slowly by a barely seen relative who smells of cat food and cigarettes.