The Sweetheart Season: A Novel

For the most part I found the characters not well-fleshed out, not believable, and not very interesting. Overall, it seems to me written in an unnecessarily confusing way, requiring a lot of work on the reader's part to clarify what the author is really saying. The "conversation with the author" (included in my copy) is more interesting than the book itself.

After finishing the book I went to Amazon.com to check editorial reviews and found that Kirkus expressed my reactions pretty well with the following comment: "sluggish though skillful." Too much so to bother with unless you have a compelling responsibility to bother with it.


Ironic, knowing, thoroughly enjoyable   August 25, 2000
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

The Sweetheart Season concerns a small town in northern Minnesota, Magrit, home to a grain mill and an associated cereal business. It is set in 1947. The viewpoint character is Irini Doyle, though the story is told in the "voice" of her daughter, retelling Irini's story from a present day perspective. Irini lives with her alcoholic father (her mother is dead), who is a research chemist at the cereal company. Irini works in the Research Kitchen of the cereal company. The other characters are her co-workers (all women) in the Kitchen, as well as the company founder, his wife, and his grandson, and a few other local women.

The main action of the novel revolves somewhat loosely around a promotional scheme of the founder: the girls at the company form a baseball team, which barnstorms through Minnesota and Wisconsin, purportedly demonstrating the nutritive benefits of the company's cereal by their success. Several other narrative threads are woven into the story: the writing of a continuing promotional kitchen/life advice column by the fictional Maggie Collins, a sort of Betty Crocker-type spokesperson for the cereal company; the antagonism between the former residents of Upper Magrit (submerged to make the mill) and Lower Magrit (where everyone now lives); the involvement of the mill owner's wife with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement; the efforts of the local women to find love and husbands in a town left nearly male-free by the war; and a mysterious (young, male) visitor to Magrit. All of these threads are well-integrated with the novel's theme, as I read it: essentially: the nascent "Women's Liberation" movement, though that over-simplifies: but the focus on the "Kitchen", yet in the context of women who are all working, and playing a nominally male sport, combined with the ironic voice of the present day narrator, and the ironic-in-this-context quotes from Maggie Collins' women's magazine advice column, quite nicely merge to make simple, true, statements about the position of women in 1947, and in our time.

The female characters are very well drawn, and almost invariably engaging. A couple of the male characters come off as ciphers, but the portraits of Irini's father, and of old Henry Collins, the mill owner, are very good. Fowler's prose is clean and elegant. Her narrative voice is a delight: ironic, affectionate, knowing, often very funny. One brief quote, from one of Maggie Collins' advice columns, meant to be read in the context of the decision to form a baseball team: "Polls have recently confirmed what has long been suspected; most men do not want brainy women. Stewardesses have turned out to be that occupation blessed most often with marriage. The key elements appear to be uniforms and travel."

I wouldn't rank The Sweetheart Season quite as highly as Fowler's first novel, Sarah Canary. At times the usually wonderfully controlled ironic voice turns a little shrill. At times she drives home a point unnecessarily: it is sufficient to show us the evidence, or to leave an ironic statement alone for the reader to interpret. Also, I was completely unable to believe the resolution of one of the plot threads. However, the book as a whole is thoroughly enjoyable, and says a lot of worthwhile things about the place of women in our society, especially about how (and, I suppose, why) it changed in the years during and after World War II.


Too Clever By Half   July 16, 2000
 5 out of 13 found this review helpful

There's no doubt that Ms. Fowler is a talented writer. Her problem, I think, is that she is so captivated by her own abilities that she scarecely lets the reader appreciate them for himself. I, for one, found the constant interventions of the narrator and her leaning on the reader to be both repetitive and annoying. The story itself is told in about twice the time it should take and with the exception of Irini, her father, and Ruby Redd, none of the characters are fully realized for me. This is particularly and sadly true of Ada who is mostly caricature, but meant -- I think -- to be sympathetic. Keeping the members of the Sweethearts straight was a major task. On the plus side, this is a fine rendering of America just after WWII and is pretty funny in many parts; the humor of the letters and the recipes tucked in between the story is especially fun. A talent at work surely, but too much intent on displaying itself to make the world of the fiction fully realized. One time to pay attention to the narrator: when she tells you to skip the last four pages, do so.