Book Review: The Blue Bottle Club by Penelope J. Stokes

When I started this book, I really, really wanted to like it. It was given to me by my aunts during the quilt bee this year (during their blue plate special luncheon) and the story sounded very interesting—four friends in the attic placing their dreams to the care of a blue bottle hidden up there. In reality, some of the elements of the story really are very good—the re-visioning of the fateful Christmas Day 1929 from each girl’s perspective, the agony of dreams lost and new dreams found, the falling out of touch with old friends and reconnecting through a very unlikely source, the sentimentality that links us into a story. However, the story did not work for me for two reasons—God was too almighty and the prose was so preachy I felt like I was sitting in the back pew as an unbeliever.

I usually like reading stories that have a sense of mystery and awesome power. I don’t really mind if the power is the Christian God or a similar being who acts to help us clueless humans along in our life-story. But what I do find hard to swallow is the God that Stokes used in this novel—he was just too convenient a plot device to hurry the characters out of their messes. For example when pregnant Adora faints from hunger and fatigue, it is God who places her in the arms of the caring Grace who helps her raise her son borne out of wedlock. And I really don’t want to sound like an “unbeliever” in my criticism of the book, but I do want to emphasize that the spirituality in this book was too heavy handed and was too much of a plot device for my enjoyment.

Now, onto the prose. When I took creative writing, my professor intoned again and again, “Show, don’t tell.” If I want to talk about the fact that John has disgraced himself, I don’t say “John has disgraced himself,” I show his emotional turmoil, the friends who leave him because of his actions, the misery he feels because he sees that his actions put himself and others in a bad situation. Stokes TELLS us about every single detail of every single activity and spends 342 pages TELLING the reader about the spirit moving the characters rather than showing it. I was very impatient reading the book because I wanted to sit down with Stokes and explain how she would have a much more compelling work if she had taken some time to edit out the telling and do more showing, but then I realized that she’s written and published something like 12 books, so maybe my creating writing professor didn’t know what he was talking about.

So, aunt’s Betty and BJ, I’m sorry I didn’t like the book. I did enjoy the story and wanted to read it to find out what happened, but I found myself rolling my eyes at the preachiness of the book.