At first, I dreaded this book. It starts off with an old woman rambling on about her life story, and it seemed the entire book was just going to be that. Pointless, random anecdotes that don't add up to much of anything. 
 But this old woman lived through the 1900's all the way through the 80's. She saw two world wars, the dawn of the automobile age, the end of the local economy, and segregation. 
 Quickly, these pointless anecdotes begin to add up to paint a picture of a bygone world in which a small community pulled through the depression, fended off the Ku Klux Klan, and life moved on through the war. A simpler time. A time when it seemed the individual mattered more. These little stories manage to become greater than the sum of their parts. Through these flashes, I got to know the town of Whistle Stop, and the people. 
 It also portrays segregation and racism not as something a bunch of evil people did in the south a century ago, but the way society worked back then. The book probably shows segregation in a more realistic way than anything I've ever seen or read before. There's no struggle for freedom or equal rights here, no moralizing on if this is right or not; this is simply how things were done, and it's refreshing to see it that way--to experience it as a colored person back then, never questioning it, but trying to work within it, accepting it the whole time because it is all one can do. Flagg portrays the plight of the black man so believably I have a hard time believing she isn't black herself. 
 I also got to know Evelyn, a woman of 45 who is listening to this old woman ramble. She has come to the age where she realizes her life has not turned out as she hoped. She was raised in a time when a woman's place was in the kitchen, and her purpose in life was to make her husband happy. She has done that, and what has it gotten her? She feels like she missed her chance to do anything with her life, and now she's stuck with a man she barely knows, too old to start over, too young to retire. 
 But as she listens to more about the forgotten world of Whistle Stop, Alabama, and the cafe that pulled its people together, she begins to view her life in a whole different way. 
 Though all we get to see are flashes of these people's lives, they are more than enough to know them, and the world they live in. It is a very different world, almost appealing and somewhat romanticized today, but Flagg never lets you forget that the world is not rosy and happy. These simpler times were full of racism, injustice, and horrific people who seem above the law, but these little people in Whistle Stop dealt with them just fine. They may be southern folk, but they held their own and took care of one another. 
 It's one of those rare books about which I have no complaints. Not one. It's thoroughly enjoyable, building a world that feels so real I can smell the Hoovervilles, feel the racial tension, and hear the trains coming through this tiny town of 200 residents. The people who live in this world are just as tangible. The anecdotes Mrs. Threadgoode relates make Whistle Stop, Alabama, the kind of place you wish you had grown up, the life experiences you wish you had had, the history you wish you had seen, and the people you wish you had known. 
 (As long as you were white.)