Joe Jones
By Anne Lamott
1986
First Published
3.36
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
Joe Jones is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Café, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson, ("I thought he just had good posture," said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott’s rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.
Avg Rating
3.36
Number of Ratings
1,376
5 STARS
15%
4 STARS
29%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
3%
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