Women can change the face of the world, or at least the faces of the males of the world. Through the use of attitude and physique a woman can control a room, or in the case of “A&P”, a grocery store. It doesn’t matter that one of the girls who enters the store is “chunky” and another has “a chin that was too long” all that matters is that the queen was glorious with “long white prima-donna legs” and her swim suit straps “off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and as a result the suit had slipped a little on her”. This queen bee character is the person who is unavoidable. The person we know it might not be proper to be staring at, but we all do anyways. She works the aisles of the grocery store as if they were a run way and works all of those around her as if they were an audience. She may not be trying to, but she may as well be. Shopping for just one 49 cent can of Kingfish Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream, Queenie doesn’t only capture the attention of all those at the A&P she captures the attention of everyone who reads this story and pictures such a woman completely out of place strutting around a grocery store.

I’m not in a place to completely understand “Revelation”. Being a non-believer in things such as God and karma, no matter how nice I think it would be if there were such powers to accomplish what no one else can, I couldn’t seem to relate to this story at all. I think Mrs. Turpin is a bitch on a pedestal. I think Mary Grace is a little bit crazy and a little bit genius. The story as a whole I find to be mean spirited even if it is meant to have a moral. When Mrs. Turpin is hit in the face with the book I enjoyed it, just Mary should not be carted off to wherever they may have taken her. They should praise her for her assault on such a judgmental evil woman. Turpin isn’t the only bad person in the story, I find the white trash woman almost as despicable as being white trash is no excuse for speaking the way she does. The only characters I actually respect at all as real people are Claud and the white trash woman’s son, who at least appear to just want to get on with life and pay little attention to the blabbering of the women, although I wish they would have knocked some sense into them. I guess none of this is really the point at all, but Ill allow someone else to write about that because I don’t feel qualified and or the need to talk about the mush that is religion in this story.

Holy %$&@ not what I was expecting. This Flannery chick has a dark side and a darker side and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is definitely darker than I would have ever supposed her to go. The family Flann-O presents to us seems well mannered enough, with the few quirks that should be expected of all families. There is foreshadowing and I even heard it was dark and there would be some deaths, but I was still no where near ready for what happened next. The BBQ joint is pretty awesome, strange however it is that they have a monkey in Georgia. Red Sam is a good man who may be slightly overly trusting as his wife points out, but just another good old southern boy. When the story turns it turns hard and rolls over a few times like the family car before getting shot to pieces like what was left of the family. We don’t even get a chance to think of how much trouble the family is in with their car being destroyed and many of them being injured when the fate of this family trip is sealed with the arrival of a gentleman without many manners. He speaks like the genteel should; he just has the little problem of killing folks without much reason to go along with his well-balanced demeanor. So he kills them all. Grandma, aka grand master *&$%-up, almost has a moment with him, but three holes in the chest is not quite considered a break through even when it is with the craziest B to ever roam the south. After reading through FlanFlan’s story I felt pretty bad for the family, but what really intrigued me was what made Mr. Misfit into the beast that kills men women and children for fun. We are given snippets of his story, but not enough to put together exactly what went wrong with this man who comes from a seemingly above average family. I would have liked more, even though nothing could justify what Misfit did, which I guess means I liked the story, which hopefully doesn’t mean I’m some part crazy. (845)