A Taste of the Sweet Apple: A Memoir

by Jo Anna Holt Watson

[A] quirky memoir, without the sentimentality and insistence that drives so many personal accounts. Holt Watson has a deeply moving story to tell, with fully realized characters set loose in a specific world and time. And she has a distinctly humorous voice. I'm partial to any writer who can come up with a walleyed laundress and a prize bull named Big Business, in a place called Heaven's Little Footstool. This is a wonderful book.-Bobbie Ann Mason

Jo Anna "Pee-Wee" Holt Watson's voice is so vivid that the reader is transported to a vanished rural culture: mid-20th century Kentucky. This memoir documents one summer, her seventh, at Grassy Springs Farm in the Bluegrass region of Woodford County. At the center of the book is a poetic and telling bond, an adoring friendship between this small white girl and a black foreman, Joe Collins. There's a tempestuous country-physician father, a beautiful, powerful mother in powerless times and the "wonderfully long-winded" Aunt Sudie Louisa. We witness the travail of hired laborers as well as the beauties of craft and devotion in Holt Watson's sharp rendering of traditional tobacco culture.

Here is a world of shadowy lanes, granddaddy's ice-cold artesian well, tobacco stripping rooms, a girl's pony barn, Ginnie Rae's Beauty Shoppe on Main Street and Ocean Frog's Grocery. Brimming with unsentimental innocence, she draws a tough-minded, tomboy--accomplished portrait of girlhood. In the rural tradition, Holt Watson is a conjuror of tales both hilarious and moving, mixed with temper and spirit.

Jo Anna "Pee-Wee" Holt-Watson is a fourth-generation Kentuckian and self-proclaimed Yellow Dog Democrat. She is an amateur photographer, gardener, avid sports-person, former horse trials judge, and creator of "Plumbline," a series of televised panel discussions regarding critical political and social issues. She currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Genres: Biography Memoir, Memoir

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Becky Everhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book several years ago as a prize for a writing class competition. My professor Mickey Hess said I would enjoy it, but I was doubtful (I'm not a big fan of autobiography, and the title seemed kinda sweet), so it has been resting on my shelf ever since...until a week ago when I actually started reading it and discovered it may wll be one of the best books I've ever read. That said, I will most likely read it again sometime.

The characters are well thought-out, the setting lush and real, and the tales unfurled are fantastic and imaginitive with just enough humor. I found in this book's narrator "Pig" (Holt Watson's childhood nickname) a comrade for the rough and tumble farmgirl I once was. Furthermore, i was glad to see this memoir was not stuck on proving the author's importance as much as to just tell the tales.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a memoir about the author's childhood on a Kentucky tobacco farm. It is essentially a collection of anecdotes, unrelated incidents that underscore Holt's assertion that she was a wild tomboy who shocked her parents. This book really conjures up a particular time and place, but it tends to wander and is unfocused. Overall, I didn't care for it much.

[Sonia Reppe · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is rambling and boring.