That being said, did anyone else wonder what the point was to have Hap Luckadoo as a character?! Overall the book is a good foray into southern chick-lit and it's an easy read.You can put it down for a day or two and when you pick it up again you don't have any problems picking right up where you left off.
I found Duncan's secondary character asides to be mostly dull and lacking any information necessary to supplement a vigorous plot. Though well-intentioned, these reminiscences spun the older generation of woman characters do little to help the reader get into the heads of them. The secondary characters, particularly Maxann, were conceived well enough to not need the additional background provided in the memory asides.
Duncan's gentle capture of local dialect proves that her ear is well-honed to the sounds around her. I could hear Maxann drawling, Idalene chastising, and Pansy speaking as if they were in the room with me.
I enjoyed the small details that Duncan obviously planned long and hard. The Lurch-like attendant in the rest home that thinks he still works in a funeral parlor and becomes frightened each time a patient moves is so creative as to have to be a real event in Duncan's life.
Although it seems that Duncan avoided anything too "dirty" or controversial (i.e. sex) to the point of being painfully obvious, it was nice to read a book where I couldn't predict that ending (for instance: the reaction of one character who gets shot in the stomach by her drunken husband). There were a few "broken links" in the story that while made me think "You go girl!" at the time, made my mind race at the end. "Well, what happened?"
Mostly, I enjoyed Plant Life. At times it was tough to wade through all the flashbacks. I would have enjoyed it more 100 pages shorter and perhaps with an epilogue that seemed less a jagged edge: this one was sort of "Thelma & Louise" for my cut-and-dry taste. It puts a period where a comma should be, though you can't help but to smile to wonder the characters' futures.
