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    Dear Ann: A Novel
    Dear Ann: A Novel
    Dear Ann: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Dear Ann: A Novel

    Written by Bobbie Ann Mason

    Narrated by Janet Metzger

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the acclaimed author of the classics Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country comes a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love.

    Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for—a boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the “Real Thing,” to be in love with someone who loves her equally.

    Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything. Ann and Jimmy bond through music and literature and their own quirkiness, diving headfirst into what seems to be a perfect relationship. But with the Vietnam War looming and the country in turmoil, their future is uncertain.

    Many years later, Ann recalls this time of innocence—and her own obsession with Jimmy—as she faces another life crisis. Seeking escape from her problems, she tries to imagine where she might be if she had chosen differently all those years ago. What if she had gone to Stanford University, as her mentor had urged, instead of a small school on the East Coast? Would she have been caught up in the Summer of Love and its subsequent dark turns? Or would her own good sense have saved her from disaster?

    Beautifully written and expertly told, Dear Ann is the wrenching story of one woman’s life and the choices she has made. Bobbie Ann Mason captures at once the excitement of youth and the nostalgia of age, and how consideration of the road not taken—the interplay of memory and imagination—can illuminate, and perhaps overtake, our present.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 8, 2020
    ISBN9780063033962
    Author

    Bobbie Ann Mason

    Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of works of fiction, including The Girl in the Blue Beret, In Country, An Atomic Romance, and Nancy Culpepper. The groundbreaking Shiloh and Other Stories won the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won two Southern Book Awards and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. Former writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, she lives in Kentucky.

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    Reviews for Dear Ann

    3.5/5

    16 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I've not read any Bobbie Ann Mason for twenty years or more, not since IN COUNTRY and her SHILOH stories. Then I saw DEAR ANN mentioned on social media recently and knew I had to read this one. Because, like Mason, I too grew up in the fifties and was part of the sixties 'summer of love' and Sgt Pepper era, and remember the anti-war protest marches and the constant news coverage of the battles and body counts. And I have to tell ya, I absolutely LOVED this book. And for a number of reasons. First of all, it was so enlightening to get a young woman's viewpoint on those years, even if the narrator's remembrances are of an 'imagined' Stanford University and Palo Alto in 1967-68. I've looked at a few other readers' reviews and reactions to DEAR ANN, and I get it that they were confused or put off by the the way Mason framed Ann's story, changing the setting from her real graduate school years in cold upstate New York to a warmer Palo Alto and Stanford, and throwing in her musings from fifty years later. Yeah, okay. I get it. So maybe it was a bit confusing. So what? Because what I loved most about DEAR ANN was the sweetness of the love story of Ann and Jimmy. Because there is never anything quite so magical as that first REAL love, which is what Ann wanted, what she was searching for. And Mason's descriptions of the way they "plunged into each other without any thought to consequences," and how "Holding each other, the intensity of the pleasure, was beyond anything described in her books, wasn't in any poem in the world." And then there is the silliness and fun of the "naming of the parts." Ah yes - bubble, pogo stick, the bandersnatch and dog toys. "They were teenagers, shameless and silly. They were the first explorers. They sat cross-legged, two lotus blossoms, facing each other. Four naked knees nudging. She had never been this close with a boy, eyes open, staring at each other's nakedness."With this kind of joy, discovery and wonder, there is bound to be some disappointments and heartbreak too, but I'm not gonna go into that here. I prefer the joy. In fact I was even reminded of another favorite book about that same kind of first love, Betty Smith's minor classic, JOY IN THE MORNING. And I remembered too. What I was doing in those same years. In fact, fresh out of the Cold War Army, I was in my second year of college and had just met my wife-to-be, and by the end of 1967 we were married. And in that next year, when the anti-war protests were at their peak, we were living in college married housing and I was scrambling to get through college and into grad school, working part-time every night and weekends, only vaguely aware of the student protests and candlelight marches and sit-ins going on all around me. So DEAR ANN was a reminder and a revelation to me, of so much of what I missed. But I do remember the music, the songs, the anthems of the era, which are very much an essential part of Mason's novel. And I recall too the intensity of that first real love which she describes so poignantly, but also with humor and with such utter tenderness that she made me laugh and nearly weep with remembering. THOSE things I know about, and DEAR ANN brought it all back so vividly. So no. I'm not gonna criticize the method or the framework of this book. Because I believe that it's the love story between this naive Kentucky farm girl and a boy from the Chicago suburbs that is the very heart of this book. DEAR ANN is all about love. And I loved it. Thank you, Bobbie, for bringing it all back. My very highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 4/5
      From the vantage point of a woman in her 70's on a Caribbean cruise, Ann looks back on her life and ponders a big "What If..." If she had made a different choice about where to attend graduate school and gone to Stanford instead of a fictional college in Upstate New York, how would her life have been different? She plays with the impact the different setting would have had, even with the same lifelong friendships she did have. Mainly she hopes in her daydreaming she can imagine a different outcome of her romance with Jimmy, the love of her life. The counterculture of the California 60's is like a main character of this novel, and as someone of Ann's generation I found it an authentic and nostalgic trip with Ann down memory lane. The heartache of the Vietnam War and the decisions young men were forced to make was embodied in Jimmy and his friends. The ending, back on a luxury cruise ship in the present, served as an effective contrast to Ann's imagined and real life during the 60's.
    • 2/5
      In this partly epistolary novel, Ann, originally from a farm in Kentucky, dreams of the sixties. She is on a cruise ship in 2017, in her golden years. She frames her true sixties in a more romantic California setting at Stanford, instead of reminiscing where she actually went to graduate school, a minor college in upstate New York. As a reader, I was not sure why the novel was written this way and was confused by it. I am still not sure whether she went to Stanford at all. She may have gone to a romantic poetry seminar, where she may have met some or all of her actual college friends, whom the ending makes it clear are real people.She may also have met the love of her life at that one seminar, or maybe not. Jimmy was flaky and mentally abusive. I never actually got a bead on any of these characters, even Ann. Anyway, Jimmy, after expressing a great deal of anti-war sentiment and (in Ann's imagination, maybe?) attending anti-war demonstrations, pulls a Rhett Butler on the road to Tara maneuver and joins up with the Lost Cause in Vietnam. It seems that Jimmy does this purely as a literary device, so that his letters can join those of Ann's weird old hippie college professor and Ann's mom down on the farm.Ann does, or perhaps doesn't, give into pressure from various men to do things she doesn't want to do, including posing for photographs and doing LSD. The whole idea that Ann "lost her innocence" feels cliched and inauthentic. Ann is already popping speed when she arrives in California or, I suppose, her minor college in upstate New York, unless that part is also made up. She eventually declares that she is "done with male authority figures" and goes off by herself to garden. This part, I think, actually happens. The "real Ann" (senior citizen Ann on the cruise ship) sometimes intrudes into the California tale that she's telling herself, and in one of the weirdest interruptions she declares that Jimmy "isn't supposed to be there."The whole novel just does not work on a fundamental level. If Ann is framing some California dreamin' into her actual life to make it more swingin' sixties, this needs to be explicitly spelled out or she needs to be shown early and often to be an unreliable narrator. Also, why should she bother? And who is Ann?