Sweet Potato Queens' First Big Ass Novel (Browne) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
After five nonfiction bestsellers, Browne leaps into fiction (with assistance by Bottom Dollar Girls creator Karin Gillespie) and delivers a GEN-U-WINE page-turner of a novel. Fans won't be surprised that Browne's combination of bawdy humor and self-empowerment affirmations easily translates in novel form. An unexpected delight is how deftly Browne creates fully dimensional supporting characters surrounding her first-person narrator, Jill Connor. (In her nonfiction adventures, all the other queens are named Tammy and intentionally blend together.) Beginning in 1968 with five high school misfits thrown together, Browne traces the core members of the Sweet Potato Queens through two decades of weddings, funerals and disastrous relationships. While readers learn the origins of "The Promise" and the motto "Never wear panties to a party," Browne also invents some new lingo (tyrants at work are "bossholes" and men adept in bed "know about the little man in the boat"). Fans of the Queen's artery-choking recipes are in luck; after the final chapter, Browne offers menu items from Rest in Peace, a restaurant the Queens would love to open that would only serve food found at Southern funerals. Browne's hilarious and heartwarming debut sets sturdy groundwork for future fictional follies.
Publishers Weekly


More vignette than novel, this is the tale of a group of Southern gals and a gay guy as they help one another through marriages, divorces, funerals, and other life experiences, served up with plenty of wit in roughly five-year updates. The characters are colorful and likable, but the humor is mostly coarse and overly peppered with profanities. The book seems more an inconsistent retelling of Browne's previous nonfiction material now cast in a fiction mold rather than a tour de force of fresh, new stories. Browne's reading of her work is clear and solid. Also included are some recipes and an interview with the author. Recommended for larger libraries or for adult chick-lit collections
Denise A. Garofalo - Library Journal


Five high-school friends from Jackson, Miss., forge an enduring bond, based on their mutual belief in each other's fabulousness. As an antidote to the snooty clubs that won't have them, offbeat teens Jill, Mary Bennett, Patsy, Tammy and Gerald come together to form the Sweet Potato Queens, founded on the principle "If it ain't fun, we ain't doing it." Sharing humor and outsider status in school, the pals regularly get together to eat lots of pork and to gossip, and each year they dress in red wigs and sequin gowns and attend the St. Patrick's Day parade. The friends remain close long after graduation, despite taking divergent paths. Rich-girl-with-a-secret Mary Bennett heads off to soap-star fame in Hollywood; Gerald (to no one's surprise) comes out in San Francisco; and beautiful aspiring singer Tammy becomes a local TV weathergirl who drowns her numerous insecurities in a string of extramarital affairs. Midwestern-transplant Patsy moves to Atlanta and becomes a mom, while Boss Queen Jill muddles through a dull job and even duller love life. Tall and athletic, she eventually hits her stride, finding satisfaction as an in-demand personal trainer and a popular local columnist. Meanwhile, the queens experience the requisite laughter, tears and general messiness of life, all culminating in a last-minute London intervention to save Tammy from her latest bad decision. This fictionalized account of the origins of Browne's real-life SPQs (The Sweet Potato Queens' Wedding Planner and Divorce Guide, not reviewed, etc.) has a slapdash feel. Co-written with Gillespie, author of the Bottom Dollar Girls series, it reads less like a novel than what it is: the latest extension of this successful southern-fried brand. Breezy, but likely to move only existing fans of the Sweet Potato Queens.
Kirkus Reviews