NC Grape Escape Tours Adds Limo Party Bus to Fleet for Transportation to WineriesA new limo party bus is available to reserve on NC Grape Escape Tours’ winery tours and wine-tasting trips. High Point, NC (PRWEB) February 15, 2013 With warm weather right around the corner, NC Grape Escape Tours has added a limo party [...]
NC Grape Escape Tours Adds Limo Party Bus to Fleet for Transportation to Wineries
A new limo party bus is available to reserve on NC Grape Escape Tours’ winery tours and wine-tasting trips. High Point, NC (PRWEB) February 15, 2013 With warm weather right around the corner, NC Grape Escape Tours has added a limo party bus to its fleet
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
Just about everything in Endora, Iowa (pop. 1,091 and dwindling) is eating Gilbert Grape, a twenty-four-year-old grocery clerk who dreams only of leaving. His enormous mother, once the town sweetheart, has been eating nonstop ever since her husband’s suicide, and the floor beneath her TV chair is threatening to cave in. Gilbert’s long-suffering older sister, Amy, still mourns the death of Elvis, and his knockout younger sister has become hooked on makeup, boys, and Jesus — in that order. But the biggest event on the horizon for all the Grapes is the eighteenth birthday of Gilbert’s younger brother, Arnie, who is a living miracle just for having survived so long. As the Grapes gather in Endora, a mysterious beauty glides through town on a bicycle and rides circles around Gilbert, until he begins to see a new vision of his family and himself….
With this wry portrait of small-town Iowa — and a young man’s life at the crossroads — Peter Hedges created a classic American novel “charged with sardonic intelligence” (Washington Post Book World).
Customer Review: Peel Me a Grape
By now, most anyone who doesn’t live under a rock has likely seen the film based on this book. The cast was great, the performances wonderful, (DiCaprio should have won the Oscar for this. Who didn’t think, even briefly, how the director “got that boy to do those things?” Admit it!) and ultimately, we feel good about the ending in an uneasy Euro-flick sort of way. If you grew up in a small town, Endora is Your Town and Gilbert Grape is Someone You Knew. Do yourself a favor and read the book, but don’t expect a feel-good read. Expect a window into the mind of an understandably jaded young man trying to make it through.
What the film can’t deal with, really, is the broad scope and study of the characters. The book is darker than the movie, a sort of comedy bouncing along with discordant background music. It’s funny and it’s not, much like growing up in the dying Endora that Hedges describes. Anyone with a similar experience of Smalltown, USA will just nod, smile, and keep right on reading because the matter-of-fact narrative hits home page after page. The characters get peeled open for us, especially Gilbert, as he is the narrator. Mama Grape is less a tragic feel-so-sorry-for-her figure and more the self-absorbed, pitious shadow that looms over this family. Gilbert also has more darkness in him than Johnny Depp was given room to convey in the film, although he did a fantastic job piquing our interest.
What really is eating Gilbert Grape? Read this book and find out how the future doesn’t immediately occur to someone whose present appears to be a prison.
Customer Review: Courtesy of Mother Daughter Book Club.com
The characters in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges are gritty and flawed and repulsive and totally engaging as well as entirely believable. It’s a great study of a young man seeking meaning for his life and trying to decide when he can put his own needs before the needs of a very dysfunctional family.
Gilbert’s day-to-day life in small-town Iowa is mind-numbingly realistic, and you can understand both his frustrations at the life he’s living and the limitations that keep him living it. As long as he doesn’t think too much about his situation or analyze his prospects for the future, life can go on as before.
But when a girl who is very different from anyone else Gilbert knows arrives on the scene, he begins to question everything. This is a great book to read in a mother-daughter book club of girls in 11th grade up or an adult book club and then to watch the movie. Comparing and contrasting the two is very interesting, particularly since author Peter Hedges also wrote the screenplay.
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