Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home Reviews

• 
  Janisse Ray

  I gave this book 5 stars, but seeing as I wrote it, I thought that might be too biased, and I removed the stars. LOL.
• 
  Allison

  Janisse is a writing role model for me. Here she talks about moving home, back to south GA where she grew up, to her town of 1400. She was a single mom with a young son, moving to her grandmother's old house on the family farm. She is an activist for restoring and saving the remaining native pine forests and for living rurally and locally. I just inhaled this book since I am in the middle of moving to the county where I grew up, to a town of 146. It is a moving account of a woman growing up, in a sense, getting in touch with her ancestors, yet still maintaining her resolve and her ideals from her youth. Beautiful!
• 
  Ann

  Beautiful Remminder
  
  This book took me back to my beloved Georgia land, much to it no longer the same. I love how the author tied the quilt she and her mother was sewing in with the land. Amazing book.
• 
  Deborah Adams

  Wild Card Quilt is a memoir of Ray's return to the small Georgia town where she grew up, with the aim of reconnecting to family and raising her young son as part of a familiar and substantial community. There's so much to love about this book, but I am especially awed by the way the author expresses so much affection for the people and the place even as she fights to preserve the eroding environment and culture.
• 
  Melissa Morris

  Author returns to her family homestead in rural Georgia and realizes she doesn’t quite fit in, if she ever did. She finds community where she can, in bits, pieces, and remnants and realizes the beauty through the rips and the tears. Beautiful and inspiring writing. Highly recommend to all who wish they could go home again but know that they can’t.
• 
  Jessica

  Ray's writing demonstrates again and again her ability to understand humanity and nature to be intricately woven together. Her metaphor of the quilt works well to address this theme, as well as to capture the fading remnants of folk culture in the ever "progressing" South. Readers of Ecology will recognize species and characters mentioned in Wild Card Quilt. This book made me ache for home.
• 
  Joyce Reynolds-Ward

  Community makes sense. That's a major underlying theme of this book, and the assorted essays circle around this notion in various ways. An excellent collection that addresses issues of the rural South with regard to being female, raising a child, and, most of all, going back home.
• 
  Anne Vandenbrink

  Loved this sequel to Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Janisse returns home after 17 years with her young son. She fixes up her grandmother's house, reestablishes friendships and family relations, and, as in her first book, recounts past childhood memories. A wonderful book of finding oneself.
• 
  Kate

  
  I love Ray's work. Excellent book.
• 
  Gina

  I love her writing. It shows her deep, heartfelt appreciation of nature, family, and friends. Her optimism and authenticity is refreshing in today’s world.
• 
  Kate Van

  This book helps me remember why I fight to stay in the South. I need it and it needs me.
• 
  Jeff Garrison

  I enjoyed Ray’s “Ecology of a Childhood Cracker†so much I sought out more of her books. She ends her first book with having left home for college in the Georgia highlands. Now, seventeen years later, Ray returns, moving into her deceased Grandmother’s “heart pine†home, a place that might fall in had not the termites been holding hands (19). She’s a single parent with a young son. She has a Master’s Degree and has lived in Montana and Florida. Through essays, Ray gives us a glimpse of her life as she tries to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong and show that one can come home again. But it’s not an easy trip and at times Ray is ready to throw in the towel and strike out for more promising lands.
  
  This book is multi-faceted. On the one hand, it’s about the role “place†plays in our lives and stories. I love her idea of how we learn place from light (275) and how she describes the passing of time by the shadows and the rising and setting of the sun (160f). Reading this, I recalled winters in the longleaf forest that use to be behind the home where I grew up and how the trees would casts such long shadows. The book is also about relationships and Ray writes honestly about her relationship with her parents, her deceased grandmother, Uncle Percy, her son, and a sister who is estranged from her family but who is reunited with them at Janisse’s wedding. The book is also about longing for relationships as Ray mentions going out with another single woman in search of a man (80f), and how she finally found her “man†reading a book at a folk music festival (287f). Some of the stories are a little sappy for my taste, almost like chick-lit, but I enjoyed them anyway. Throughout the book, one learns of the loss the rural south and what it means for the ecosystem. I hope she keeps writing, we need more voices that understand the interconnectedness between the human race and nature.
  
  One senses grace in Ray’s life. I love her story of judging a pork cooking contest. She had not eaten pork in 20 years, but finally agreed to be a judge. A pot of Brunswick stew took first place. Concluding the essay, she writes:
  -
  
  From the pork-cooking contest I learned that many things are above dogma. Respect, for example. Love. The requirements of our place in a community may land us in the middle of odd, funny stories we never schemed for ourselves. What we are asked to contribute may lie outside the lines of what we imagine. Some of our participation we can’t design. (273)
  
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  Many of these essays elicit a personal response from me. I felt a tinge of guilt when she laments over those Southerners who love the wild having fled the South (189). I’m one of them (although I’ve been adopted by the intermountain west). Thinking back, I was most involved with the Sierra Club when I lived in the South, at a time when the group wasn’t popular, but it seemed to me that they were the only ones in the late 70s talking about the need to preserve ecosystems. I also became nostalgic reading about wire grass and long leaf pines, two species that played an important role in the worlds in which Ray and I had been “raised up.†She speaks of coming into a longleaf forest that “stood out like the Kingdom of Heaven, suddenly tall and very green, praising the sky†(116). Finally, melancholy swept over me when I learned that she discovers her “soul-mate†while he’s reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ve read that book several times, the first being back in the 70s and never found a nature loving woman with a southern drawl that was interested in the book. If one said anything about me reading the book, it was probably about how motorcycles are dangerous or that Zen is some kind of pagan religion.
  
  I've also published my review in my blog.
• 
  Jean Carlton

  Being a quilter the title caught my eye but I am not interested in the many 'quilt' novels out there so when I read the jacket cover I knew this was different. The title is just one of the stories as it typical of a short story collection but the book is about the author's move at age 35 back to her roots in Georgia. A writer, now divorced with a son, she goes back to live in her grandmother's house on a farm. She writes about life there in the small rural community and of her true passion - nature, the land, saving the forests. She does connect life to a quilt saying, "Wholeness doesn't have a beginning or an end, but is a process....It's like making a quilt. We start with pieces of a good, well-functioning life, and all our lives long we try to put them together until we finally have something beautiful that functions, that is whole, that makes us happy. Even then it will need mending,but that is the work of humanity."
• 
  Benjamin Sigrist

  Janisse Ray is such a talented author. She brings you right into her experience, transitioning back to her rural Georgia community after being away. The stories are wonderful each in their own way but the real standout is her way with the words. No hyperbole, no excess description; it doesn't seem like she is even trying when you are reading her stories of the community she refinds her place in.
  
  This book will give you pause and encourage you to think about your own community, whether rural or otherwise, and what you are doing to add to it.
• 
  Liz

  Less autobiographical than Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and more informative about her conservation efforts for the Georgia long leaf pine forests. When Ray is seeking out like-minded people in rural Georgia she laments, "Over
  decades the South has bled people who were thoughtful about the land and society. They couldn't take the racism or the Bible thumping, and they left."
  
  I have found this to be painfully true.
• 
  Nicole

  More a collection of essays than a novel, it was an interesting read. I enjoyed the author's style of writing, and I liked that she infused writing about her hometown and family with writing about her conservation efforts. As I read the first half or so of the book, it got me thinking about my own family history. I agree with one reviewer that the book gets a little repetitive. Also, a couple of times the jump from one topic to the next felt a little odd, a little incongruous.
• 
  Debbie Fraker

  I love this author and everything I've read of hers. Her strong connection to south Georgia strikes a chord with me, having done a lot of my growing up there. She has a strong, clear writing style with down right poetic prose from time to time. A joy to read and educational on the environmental needs of this part of the world.
• 
  Susan

  This book led me to some interesting parallels between the author's experiences and my mom's hometown in north-western Pennsylvania. Janisse's voice was refreshing...without pushing us towards any particular conclusion or point of view, she left us to pull together the threads of her narrative on our own terms. I wanted to jump into my truck with my old dog and head down to visit.
• 
  Sue

  I had to know more about Jenissee Ray's life, after reading Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I was intrigued by her life's journey and needed to know more about her siblings, her son and the decision to move back to rural Georgia. I admire her dedication to restoring and keeping our natural areas.