Feather Crowns

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the turn of this century, this engaging novel by the author of In Country tells the story of a young farm wife, living in rural Kentucky, who unintentionally creates a national sensation when she gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, Southern, Literary Fiction, Novels, 20th Century

480 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Bobbie Ann Mason has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her books include In Country and Feather Crowns. She lives in Kentucky.

Reviews

[Karyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been fascinated by multiple births, as it's such an uncommon event (though it's becoming a bit more common with the rise of fertility treatments). I remember the furor over "Octomom" and her octuplets, and I did agree that asking a human body to carry so many babies is probably not a fair, or even healthy, thing. So as I read this book, about a young woman Christie Wheeler who carried a set of quintuplets to term and gave birth to them in 1900, I began to wonder if this could really be based on a true story.

By Googling "quintuplets" and "Kentucky," I landed on this page detailing the story of the Lyon Quintuplets, a set of baby boys who had been born in 1896 but had lived only about two weeks. The circumstances with this book were quite familiar, in that the babies were again embalmed, but Mason was able to take the bare bones of the story of the Lyon quints and turn it into a novel in which the reader has a great deal of sympathy for the Wheeler quints and their parents.

One of my favorite parts of the book was when Christie, as a mature woman, goes to Canada to meet the Dionne quintuplets, the first set of quints that had lived past infancy. Reading this book had reminded me of the girls, and so I read up on Wikipedia about them. Their story is rather sad as well, having been taken away from their parents by the government and made into an living exhibit for anyone who wanted to come during visiting hours. But Mason has Christie remind the reader that perhaps it's not as sad as it seems, that at least the Dionne quints always had enough to eat and were protected from the illnesses that unrestrained crowds would have brought to the babies when they were tiny. It's a lack of milk, though the Wheelers did engage a wet nurse, and the germs and disease brought by well-meaning tourists come to gawk at the quints that killed Christie's babies, and the real-life Lyon quints as well.

This is definitely a slow-burn of a novel. There's not a whole lot that happens very quickly; in fact, the birth of the five babies takes up the first 82 pages with flashbacks to a prayer meeting Christie attended when she was newly pregnant. I feel as if the book is a little too long, and a bit too long-winded in spots. For some, it would make the story more vivid, but for me, it simply made the novel drag on a bit too much.

I also am not sure we needed both of the last two chapters. As mentioned above, I loved that Christie went to Canada, but it seemed as though the last chapter reiterated a lot of what had been told on her way to Canada, just in her voice as an old woman. It did feel a bit repetitive. Perhaps we could have had Christie reminisce about her life and her trip to Canada in her own voice in the last chapter.

All in all, it was an interesting book, but a little bit slow. It's also very sad, with a lot of hardships endured by the characters, but it was a hard period in American history, with the nation still trying to recover from the Civil War. When you're working so hard just to survive, there isn't time for much else, not even taking enough time to grieve over the worst things.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Bobbie Ann Mason. She is a wonderful thoughtful author including much wisdom in her writing. The premise is based on the true incident of quintuplets being born in Kentucky in 1900. I highly recommend this book.

[Amanda Fucello · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in less than a week, I thought it was so captivating. I love a little bit of magic in stories and Feather Crowns feels surreal in some aspects. While it is not as magical and fantastic as other tales, there are definitely elements of wonder woven into this family's story. I often strive to read female authors and I love getting different perspectives from different backgrounds and cultures, and though this is a thoroughly American story, the setting was still quite alien to me, as its about a 1900's Kentucky farm family and the birth of quintuplets. (Which at that time is completely unheard of.) There is a lot of pain and loss in this story, but something about it felt like a great release at the end.
It is a super easy read, go for it.

[Sandra Winkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It reminds me of the superstitions my grandmothers forewarned. Especially the ones related to me when I was pregnant. They told me all kinds of things I shouldn't do so I wouldn't "mark" my baby.(I must have done something right; my boys are all wonderful and beautiful)
Since I have twins, the multiple birth storyline was interesting. I really enjoy Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction.

[Marla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is astounding on many levels, not the least of which is that what you think is going to happen doesn't. Great characterization.

[Toni Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very most favorite books of all time. If you like historical fiction, you'll like this.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christie Wheeler is carrying quintuplets, only she doesn’t know it. It’s the turn of the last century and medical science isn’t exactly sophisticated enough for an ultrasound yet. All she knows is there’s something inside her – maybe a monster, or a demon, but definitely not a baby. But after she miraculously gives birth to five healthy, if tiny, babies inside her rural Kentucky home, she discovers that her pregnancy is just the beginning. She, the new babies, and the rest of her extended family soon get swept up in the country’s excitement over their extraordinary set of circumstances.

Feather Crowns is fiction, but it’s based on the true story of the first recorded birth of quintuplets in America. Even though the story nominally is centered around the babies, it’s really an examination of rural life in the early 1900s. Christie lives on a tobacco (‘tobaccer’, as she says) farm with her husband – and her husband’s extended family. While they have separate houses, it makes for a close living quarters indeed. So much family this close by can be a boon, though – Christie made having quintuplets plus three other children almost seem easy, since she had at least five other women to help her out! I found the most interesting part of the book to be learning about the customs and beliefs of people during this time period – that the men were served first at every meal, that women worked in the fields as well as the men, that finding a ‘feather crown’ inside a pillow was an omen of death.

The look back in time was definitely the most compelling part of the story for me. While the characters were interesting and developed, I myself had a hard time developing a connection with any of them. During parts of the story where the reader is supposed to be sad, I was just frustrated at the narrative. I also found the book to be longer than it needed to be – the plot meandered back and forth and felt stalled in several parts. There’s also something that happens halfway through the book which nearly made me put it down altogether – I won’t tell you what, for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say I was almost fed up. For the most part I ‘nothinged’ this book. While it was interesting to get a view of the early 1900s not set in urban New England, I found the storytelling too lacking to develop true feelings for the characters or their situations beyond frustration. I’m glad I finished it for the sake of finishing it, but I can’t truly recommend this book, even for historical fiction fans.

If you liked this review, check out my others on my blog!

[Carol Hardesty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like "Things Fall Apart", "Feather Crowns" was required summer reading for high school. And like "Things Fall Apart", I didn't much care for it. It started off good enough: a simple young woman gives birth to the first quintuplets in North America. (And in my home state of Kentucky, no less! [Go Kentucky! :-)]) But then... Oh, I shudder just thinking about what happens next. The babies die (all of them!) and then their parents actually put the corpses on display at a circus freak show. That's parenting worthy of a Jerry Springer episode, am I right? So the reason I only gave "Feather Crowns" one star is because, although it had a promising beginning, the story radically shifts gears halfway through and it becomes extremely cold, harsh, and disturbing.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is one of my favorite authors, especially in the short story form. Now that I live in SW Virginia I can actually relate more to her stories. That said, for me this story was too sad. I had hard time reading it as I felt it was a little too raw. I don't know how she comes up with her ideas! This story was about a family in this region of the country who had the first ever surviving quintuplets and how it not only drastically changes her life but that of her community. Well written a masterpiece really but just not my speed.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love everything I have read by Bobbie Ann Mason, and Feather Crowns is no exception. There is something very lyrical and mysterious here. The characters are very real people dealing with extraordinary events. I was very moved.

[Adam Carrico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating historical novel about a family in 1900 who happened to live about a half mile from the house where I grew up. The story was interesting and I loved all the small details of life over a hundred years ago. It’s a long, slow book, but kept me entertained throughout.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book ,an imaginative psychological interpretation of a true story of a woman who has given birth to quintuplets in the early 1900s.

[Tracy R · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Susan Emmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I do think this novel, full of truthful history, could have been much less long without losing force, I love Mason and the novel was full of what makes her a fine writer.
The life of Christianne Wheeler marks the book and Mason fills its pages with remarkably drawn characters. Add to that the sweep of history, of true capture of Kentucky farm life, the religious and economic and cultural gulfs between city and country folks, the role of women, the hard won knowledge of land and plants and healing and birthing, and you have a sense of all this book holds and shows and tells.
Christie's yearning to see more and learn more and know more is so real, as are her struggles to cope with grief, her husband James and his family, and the absolutely unnerving trek they make around the South with their dead quints in tow in order to make some money and exact a sort of revenge on all the thrill seekers who invaded their Kentucky home.
I'm glad I read this book years after its publication in a time of instant news when it's hard to separate fact from fiction.

[Marsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok. I think she could have told her story in about half as many pages.

[Garry Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

written July 1994
Instead of dozens of little blurbs excerpted from all of the favorable reviews that this book has received, I wish that the publishers had used the back cover and the first three pages of the book to quote Bobbie Ann Mason talking about the book. I got tired and suspicious of all the puffery, and I really lost heart when I discovered halfway through the book what happened to the quints. It wasn't until I listened to Mason read from the first 100 pages of the book and talk about it on book tour that I realized I had been looking at and for the wrong thing: this book is not about the quints, but about mother Christie's life as a result of them. Mason has Christie herself tell us this fact, but not until the book is nearly over; after she has spent virtually the whole of her life trying to figure out the strange events of her life and learn how to interpret those "signs" properly, she realizes "the central flaw in her desire to understand why such an extraordinary thing had happened to her. It wasn't WHY it happened -- that couldn't be known; it was what the world made of it that was at issue" (417).

That's what Mason's story is really concerned with, and that's why she kept talking during her reading about its "relevance" to modern life. At first I thought she was referring to the fact that her story is set in 1900 and dramatizes the millennial excitement that we will have to endure for the next six years, with evangelical preachers and everyone else trying to interpret the signs at the end of the age. But now I think she meant instead how sometimes events in people's lives, if they are big enough and strange enough, get taken away from the people they happen to and taken over by the public, just like the quints somehow invited people to transgress the normal rules of polite society on a scale that simply overwhelmed the Wheeler family. I can't think of this story now without seeing O.J.Simpson's face on the tv screen of my mind.

I was only about 2/3 of the way through the book when I heard Mason read from it, but that was about the time I really started to appreciate the book -- though whether that was because I finally figured out what it was (and wasn't) about, or because I had warmed to her personally, or because the book itself started moving more, I can't say. Somehow it helped me to have the fact/fiction question answered: this story is based on a true event, the birth of the Lyon quints in Mason's own neck of the Kentucky woods in 1896; the central character is named for and a tribute to Mason's own mother; Mason made up virtually all of the details of the story based on her research in folklore and rare old newspaper accounts and conversations with her mother. Apparently the event caused quite a stir at the time before being almost totally forgotten for almost a century. The most striking image Mason uncovered in her research is the one that came through to me the most powerfully in her story -- the crowd invading Christie's home sprung from the real-life event of the stranger stepping through the window of the Lyon home (193-5, 450).

I kept waiting for a lot of the loose threads of detail in the narrative to be tied up, like the revival at Reelfoot or the fibroids or the nice Memphis couple (201-3). Maybe I was trying to read the signs too, but as Christie tells her husband James about those feather crowns of the title, "I never did understand what those things meant anyhow" (417). "Me neither," Mason seems to be saying.

[Gretchen]

My sister-in-law gave me Feather Crowns by Bobbie Ann Mason, not a book I’d have picked up otherwise; I’d never heard of the author. The prose was lovely, and transported me to Kentucky in 1900, to the house of a woman truly great with child. When she gives birth to quintuplets her home and family become the center of a community effort on the part of the women to help her with the babies, at which point I could smell the cornbread and hear the household sounds and the birds outside her window.

The closeness of the community and the friendliness and openness of the country people that are initially so appealing in this story soon set off alarms in my mother’s heart, when complete strangers hop off the train and come right in without knocking, to pick up the babies without asking. This very domestic story became a thriller for me as I turned the pages wanting to find out how fame was going to affect the babies, the marriage, the community — and most of all, the mother.

I think the story was historically accurate. I know it was very disturbing.

[Lynn Pribus · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting novel based on the true story of a woman in the 19th century who gave birth to quintuplets (with a total weight of more than 20 pounds.)

In this one, Christie gives birth to five babies and is an immediate sensation. The train that passes nearby stops and people swarm up the hill and into her house -- even through the windows. This is a long book and the first 150 pages only cover the first week with a great deal of detail given to whose titties the babies are attached to. Not only mom, but a neighbor girl and ultimately a local black woman named Mittens, although this is something of a scandal in Kentucky in those times.

The last part of the book was more interesting for me with Christie becoming more and more her own woman, overcoming her situation as a barely educated farm wife. Also an unusual novel that will stick with me. So many I bring home from the library, check on GoodReads and discover I read it only last year.

[Andrea Butlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this historical fiction and that the author told this story I had otherwise never heard about. That the Canadian born Quintuplets would have occurred within a generation of these babies was thought provoking. I appreciated learning about the potential nuances in the circumstances and hardships from the turn of that century, in the largely agricultural, minimal education, subsistence living. It was told through the eyes of a poor, common, rural mother and the circumstances of birth with limited resources, medical support or knowledge of what we have today. I was pregnant and gave birth while reading this story, so it was especially intriguing to me at this time. I would read another by this author.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A loooong, vivid exploration of family, the effects of fame, the desire for knowledge. "They expected a woman to be weak. It made her angry when people judged others by their own limitations." I thought it was an impressive book.

A taste of the prose:
"Me, I always took an interest in things. I was always busy a-doing something and trying to find out something that nobody else would think to fool with. Partly it's just keeping ahold of your real self there inside, the same way you need to save out a little bit of sourdough for the next rising. When you're little, you notice every bird feather and little worm and pig squeal. But grown folks forget to notice little things. When you have your own chillern, they're part of you and part not-you, and then they get away from you and part of you goes with them. But you have to remember that part of you that's not them. That way you can let them go."

[Sandi Leska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book follows the introspective musings of a woman throughout her life. I appreciated the blunt honesty through her eyes and experiences. Although her life occurred nearly a century before mine, I found a lot of similarity. I did not care for the long listing of paragraphs but can see how many would appreciate that level of detail. Her connection to music as a therapy (my take rather than stated in the story) was well conveyed. I could hear and feel the music. Her journeys are depicted in a way that carried me along with her. I enjoyed the ride.

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first five-star book in a while. I couldn't put it down. A wonderful tale that opened up for me what it was like to be on a farm around 1900. We are so far away now from the origins of our food! The preciousness of some commodities was also quite striking in this world of same day deliveries. Mason makes the mother of quintuplets come alive for us, and keeps the tale believable with her well researched details.

[Barb Vetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love kids, babies, everything that has to do with motherhood. This was an interesting novel, which was kind of a takeoff on reality. It’s very well written and I don’t agree with the reviews that say it’s slow. It’s just a sweet story about a mom who really had to deal with a lot of things in a time in our country where everything was hard and everyone tried to make a buck somehow. I liked it, I liked her writing, and I liked getting into Christie’s head.

[Donna Arcara · Rating 3 out of 5]

My notes from 2001: "Solid 3.5 stars. I loved the idea of this novel about a woman having quintuplets around the turn of the century. The story unfolded slowly, and the turning point of the book REALLY threw me for a loop. I read the rest of the story with my stomach in a knot! Overall, compelling and bittersweet. Very different."

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is an extremely long-winded telling of what happened to the first family to have quintuplets. While it was interesting to hear about farm life in the early 1900's and how hard it was to birth and then deal with the public interest in and deaths of these children, the author took forever to do so and continually repeated herself. I really had to force myself to finish this.

[Amber Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book full of emotion, great description of life in an earlier time, family struggles. I enjoyed sharing the lives of the characters, and was sorry when it ended. I would read other books by this auther.

[Champaign Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommendation from the Historical Fiction Genre Study, August 2017.

Is it 1900 and the times are turbulent. Americans are looking for signs of the end of the world as the century turns. At the center of the story is Christianna Wheeler who fears that her pregnancy is a sign of the apocalypse.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really had trouble getting though this book. Felt like slogging through super humid air or even mud. Not sure why. The premise was interesting, but I struggled with the story the whole way through. Only finished because I knew it would bug me if I did not.

[Ginny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out fine, with lots of homespun local color of 1900s rural Kentucky life. But I got tired of all of the descriptions and slow storyline, so I skipped the middle and read the final few chapters. It could be me- I’ve started and stopped reading two other books this week.

[Pipistrelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first time I read this, it was on Chapter A Day on public radio, and I couldn't wait for the next chapters, so I ran out and bought it. I was not disappointed.