Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Jell-O Girls: A Family History


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Today’s post is on Jell-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom. It is 288 pages long and is published by Little, Brown. The cover is light blue with a Jell-O mold dessert with a Barbie doll in it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in memoirs. There is foul language, sex, and mild violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book - A memoir that braids the evolution of one of America's most iconic branding campaigns with the stirring tales of the women who lived behind its façade - told by the inheritor of their stories.
In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments.
More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. JELL-O GIRLS is the liberation of that story.
A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, JELL-O GIRLS is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. In crystalline prose Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.

Review – An interesting memoir about a family of women, their lives and some deaths. Rowbottom starts the ending of her mother’s life and retraces the steps of her grandmother, who she never knew, her mother and herself. How they lived their troubled lives and how two of them died. Rowbottom looks into the past with honestly that at times can be uncomfortable but the past is rarely nice and neat. We, the readers, are taken from into the lives of women who did not how to speak and died with words in their mouths. Rowbottom’s grandmother never wanted to be a mother but by virtue of the time she lived, she felt that she had no choice but children. Her mother was surprised by her pregnancy but she was a willing and loving mother. All three had similar problems with men and health. The memoir is well-written full of feeling but it is just about three women and their problems. It is not ground-breaking. If you enjoy family memoirs then you should give this one a look.

I give this memoir a Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I was given this book as a gift.

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