It was such a lovely story! I enjoyed it since beginning to the end. Now it's over, I'd watch the movie soon.
I thought of a few of my girl friends while reading it. Without realising, we help each other. Quite often it's just few kind words that we need. To know that someone believes in you, someone roots for you and encourage you - it helps us trudge through. Or simply not go crazy. That's how I'll summarize Ninny Threadgoode and Evelyn Couch's friendship.

I loved the world of Ninny which she brings back from memories and so vividly describes to her friend, Evelyn. Must read for those who like old-time charm.

I listened to a newly issued audio recording of this book last summer on one of my trips from Minnesota to Illinois. I felt like I spent a week in 1930's and 1980's Alabama and I hated when the book came to an end. I love Fannie Flagg books and I really enjoy listening to them, although many of her audio books have only been issued in abridged versions. At first I was disappointed that this unabridged version was not read by Fannie herself (she's very engaging), but Lorna Raver was outstanding.

I think this was my favorite "listen" of 2011.

Sama nie wierzę, że daję 4/5 tego typu książce. Płakałam i śmiałam się do łez. Tak trzeba opowiadać!

Ξέρω ότι όσοι διάβασαν αυτό το βιβλίο το αγάπησαν. Εγώ πάλι όχι, δεν είχα όρεξη να το πιάσω στα χέρια μου και κάθε φορά που το έκανα ένιωθα λες και έκανα αγγαρεία, οπότε το έφτασα μέχρι λίγο μετά από την μέση.
Ναι είναι καλογραμμένο. Είναι μια ιστορία αγάπης που περνάει μηνύματα κατά του ρατσισμού. Είναι γλυκό, τρυφερό και νοσταλγικό, αλλά δεν ένιωσα τίποτα. Ίσως φταίει το ότι ανήκει στην ίδια κατηγορία βιβλίων που ανήκει το Όταν σκοτώνουν τα κοτσύφια και το The help, τα οποία λάτρεψα οπότε περίμενα κάτι περισσότερο, ίσως πάλι φταίει και το ότι οι κριτικές το εκθειάζουν!!! Δεν ξέρω τι… Σίγουρα φταίει εν μέρει κ η αφήγηση που γίνεται με τρείς τρόπους: Από την μια έχουμε την γιαγιά που διηγείται την ιστορία σε μια κυριούλα, από την άλλη έχουμε την ιστορία να την διηγείται ένας τριτοπρόσωπος αφηγητής και από την άλλη έχουμε και την ιστορία της κυριούλας. Και φυσικά όλα αυτά με μόνιμα πίσω- μπρος γυρίσματα στο χρόνο. Με αυτά και με αυτά δεν μπόρεσα να δεθώ με τους χαρακτήρες….
O βαθμός που θα του έβαζα αμα κυλούσε όλο έτσι είναι δύο, εφόσον όμως δεν το τελείωσα θα του βάλω τρία, γιατί ποιος ξέρει, ίσως το δεύτερο μισό να με ξετρέλανε…. Αυτά από εμένα.

I Read this book long ago and really enjoyed it. Fannie Flag used to be a member of Asilomar Writers. I too have been a member of Asilomar Writers for the last twenty-five years. Before I joined Fannie Flag read Fried Green Tomatoes in this same group. She dedicated the book to Jerry Hannah the organizer and leader (and my writing mentor). I would not be a published author today without Jerry Hannah's wonderful guidance.
This is a great book I recommend it.

This is a truly southern book, aside from the idioms and the food and the setting, aside from the friendships and family and small community goings-on. Why? Because there is robbery and murder and lies and secrecy and cover ups, all for a good cause. The Railroad Robber throws food from passing trains so poor people can eat during the Depression, but never gets caught. Frank Bennett is murdered because, you know, some people just need killin'. Everyone (mostly) lies to keep others from punishment, the ones who don't never knew the truth anyway. Secrets abound, and in the end, only the reader knows exactly what happened.

I loved the disjointed way this was written, passing back and forth between time periods, first person accounts, newspaper snippets and straight narration. I loved the innocence of people trying to make it in life, and helping others do the same. I loved the pure fun of the telling. It's impossible not to have fun reading this one, impossible not to cheer at a lot of decisions and happenings, and impossible not to be glad you read it.

Now to find the movie and do it all over again.

Initial thoughts:

I am still processing this one. Overall, I really liked it, especially the Ruth/Idgie part (which is blatantly romantic--it's stated that they are in love with each other, and that Idgie, at least, sleeps with women).

It isn't necessarily one I would recommend lightly, though, mostly for the depiction of black people. It may be realistic to have characters who grew up in the 20s talk about stereotypes of "colored people," but that doesn't mean I want to read so much of it, especially paired with the phonetically spelled accents of most of the black characters. The sympathetic characters challenge this racism to some degree, but Idgie is still friends with a KKK member. I don't really know why, for instance, there's a character who is "so black his gums are blue," and that kid grows up to stab his brother.

There are so many characters and time periods here, all jumbled up and interspersed with small-town newspaper articles. Evelyn is going through menopause and just realizing that despite doing everything she was supposed to do to be a "good girl," life hasn't turned out the way she wanted it. She's just found her anger, and now she wants to burn the world down. Ninny is in a care home and is regaling Evelyn with those stories of the Whistle-Stop Cafe. Evelyn finds comfort in her company.

I think I'll have to process my thoughts in a big review, because I can't figure out how to reconcile all of the different things happening here. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but I'm not sure how to factor in how race is depicted here (by a white author). I'll have to read some other reviews and think about it.

n  Full review at the Lesbrary.n

The problem most of the time is the book is better than the movie. In this case, I found the movie to be better than the book.

I think the fact that book jumped around a lot made it a bit hard to follow. And the ending was definitely bittersweet with so many characters who had lived with each other for decades who ended up moving on when their little town started to die. I guess this book made me a bit homesick and sad, since I see my hometown going the same way. It's slowly dying and eventually I think in a generation it will be almost a ghost town.

"Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe" begins with a woman named Evelyn who on a weekly basis just forced to visit her mother in law at the retirement home the older woman now lives. She ends up sitting next to an elderly woman named Ninny Threadgood who proceeds to tell her stories about her family and friends that lived in Whistle Stop, Alabama.

At first Evelyn feels annoyed this woman has latched onto her, but she soon starts to live for the weekly stories of Idgie, Buddy, Ruth, Stump, Big George, Sipsey, Dottie Weems, and others.

I think that Evelyn and even Ninny were developed a lot. Others in the story I wish we could follow up with more. We just got quick vignettes with them. For example, Big George's kids popped in and out of the story, I would even say so did Ruth and Idgie. I would honestly say the character after Evelyn and Ninny I felt was developed very well was Dottie Weems. We are only introduced to her by way of weekly bulletins about Whistle Stop, but her humor and love for the town was great.

I will say that the main reason why I just couldn't give this book higher than four stars was the fact that I thought that Flagg kind of took the easy way out not really describing the relationship between Idgie and Ruth. I'm assuming that they were both lesbians or at least that's how the book portrayed them. And that fact that everybody in the small town of Alabama in the 1930s was fine with Idgie and Ruth living together and Ruth's son Stump being called her son I thought was a bit of a reach. I can't see people being okay, but the fact that just called Idgie "wild" which I'm assuming was code for being gay was also weird to me. That's the only part of the book that felt kind of false to me. But then I also feel sad because I don't think the movie really showed her as being gay just as liking to wear men's clothes. So like I said I'm just kind of of two minds of how those two characters were shown. I just wish we had gotten more scenes between them.

Flagg does also touch upon the racism of the south in 1930s and the late 1980s. I did think she slowly shows that for some people even for some of the so called good characters they still had prejudices towards African Americans. For example, Evelyn realizing that she was just raised to be just scared of black men and when she finally went to the church and got to hang out with more African Americans felt at home I did not find uplifting, but sad. I do think the way that the book just portrayed African Americans in a couple of places did make me cringe.

The writing was really good. Flagg can tell a story. The flow got off in the middle. The book just jumps from subject to subject before finally hitting it's stride again.

Whistle Stop as I said above reminded me a lot of my hometown and a lot of dying towns in the US.

The ending as I said was bittersweet though I was a bit confused by it. We get to see what happened to one character and I'm surprised they were at another location far from Alabama.

I'll admit there was a moment of weakness in which I almost gave this book 4 stars. Mainly because the ending made me bawl and I connected with the characters.
But you know what? Screw all that. The racism may have been the product of those times, but a white author constantly finding ways to use the n-word just didn't sit right with me. Or the fact that Idgie was definitely portrayed as a "white saviour" type.

Maybe the most unbelievable part of the whole thing was the way everyone just accepted that Idgie and Ruth were together. In the '20s. In fucking Alabama. Right, ok.
But then, when Stump avoids girls, instead of asking him if maybe he prefers boys, Idgie sort of lectures him into dating girls and even drives him to a goddamn brothel so he can have sex with a female prostitute, despite the fact that she is gay herself? How does that make sense?

My book club chose this book on a night I was unable to attend. I wonder if they’ll share my aversion to it. For some reason, it has been very popular for years. I must have missed something. I almost decided not to review it, but I had to get it out of my system.

I concede that it’s well-crafted, though in a manner better suited to a screenplay than a novel, no doubt because of author Flagg’s background in television and directing. The fragmented narrative jumps around in time over approximately a forty-year period. An old woman in a nursing home reminisces to a friend. The third-person narrator’s is voice identical to that of the old woman reminiscing. Clips from a forcedly quaint local newspaper column break the narration up even more without moving the plot forward, and are written in essentially the same voice.

Another way in which Flagg seems affected by TV is in the broadly-drawn, stereotypical characters. It’s as if she’s the director looking for a type-cast-able actor to fill a role, and can’t think of a wholly original person. A tomboyish lesbian. Good ol’ gals. Whore with a heart of gold (perhaps not in it for money, but still—the type). Hard-working black people who have loyal and loving relationships with white employers in the Jim Crow South.

This old South is treated with cuteness and nostalgia, as if a few tough-minded, good-hearted white ladies could make it all okay. Even rape and murder turn out okay in the end because the good ol’ gals take the law into their own hands, and those good, loyal black folks do, too. This book includes the most deeply revolting way of disposing of a body I have ever read. I found it sick, not funny, even if it worked expediently in the plot.

The author’s saccharine tone while portraying injustice and racism was jarring. The reason one black character gets sent to jail is stunningly trivial and unfair, and yet the book skims over his suffering. The author relishes listing features of nightlife in the black part of segregated Birmingham, listing and listing and listing, but the life of the man so involved in that nightlife is given much less depth. Only one tragedy gets its moment as a tragedy, and it involves a minor character. The little-known piece of history relating to Hoover-towns in that scene is moving. More of the book could have had this strength, but instead got stuck in syrup.

I read cozy mysteries occasionally, and in those the authors have to walk a fine line to avoid trivializing murder and death while writing a humorous story about the process of solving a murder. In this sappy but clever book, the author fails to walk that line. In Flagg’s Whistle Stop, Alabama, sheer good-ol-galness can overcome everything from menopause and depression to The Great Depression to the loss of a limb to the Klan to an abusive husband. Despite the historical small town setting, not a single white woman is racist, and no one is prejudiced against an apparently lesbian couple either. And it ends with recipes.

Just had this quirk of making a note of a few words from the book. So here it goes-
Blue gums, Miss Fancy, Naughty Bird, Hogs, Catfish, Blue jays, Whistle Stop, Alabama, Pink Cadillac, Boots, Opal, Dumplings, Fried chicken, Willie Boy, Blue Polka, Flower girl, Dill Pickle Club.
Now as much as I loved this book, there are a few things that struck me as peculiar. The understated homosexuality of the lead pair; how could it be so readily accepted by the townspeople? Fannie Flagg never describes it in the sexual context. Apart from the first few romantic interchanges, there are not much detailed descriptions of any personal/romantic communication between Ruth and Idgie. Well without any certainty I can say that this understatement of homosexuality and ambiguity serves a purpose in the way our reading of the book is directed. The relationship seems to spill copiously both in the spheres of a genuine asexual female friendship and a beautiful romantic bond between the two women. Neither can one place it just in the one and not in the other. It is beautiful in both ways and so does it illuminate the prospect and possibilities of bonding between women. How much can they change each other and themselves for the better with greater self-esteem and self-identification. I would consider this book one of the most enjoyable reads ever. A southern kind of story, it is beautiful, warm, and humourous. Makes me yearn for places I have never been, and for a moment in history I can never live.

Reading this one was like spending a sunny afternoon, lazily drinking fresh iced tea on the veranda, surrounded by friends and family.

Love and highly recommend this hilarious and heart warming Southern yarn. It’s full of nostalgic moments, intriguing characters, yearning, delicious food as well as the best and the worst of human nature. So happy to have finally read this adorable and entertaining book!