This Is What It Smells Like edition by Cathy Adams Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : This Is What It Smells Like edition by Cathy Adams Literature Fiction eBooks 
"My mother gave birth to me because she wanted someone to fix her a sandwich." From the first sentence you know that Valentine's life is different.
At age twenty-four Valentine has never met her father, Ray.Now he asks to return to her North Carolina home so that he can meet her and die in peace. When he shows up with the step-son no one knew existed and his pet gecko, Val wants nothing to do with either of them, but Tess, her drug-addicted mother, is ready to bring everyone together in one big dysfunctional family.
Born with the surreal ability to smell deception, love, fear, even days of the week, Valentine sniffs out a decades old secret between her mother, the brooding priest who has been spying on her from his office window at the College across the street, and the dying father she knows only from old photographs.
Forgiveness and reconciliation seem impossible until something is revealed to Valentine on the night of her father’s death.
This Is What It Smells Like edition by Cathy Adams Literature Fiction eBooks
This Is What It Smells Like, the recently published first novel by Cathy Adams is a delightful read, filled with the best traditions of Southern Gothic fiction. The novel's quirky, interesting characters lead lives which run the gamut from wacky to profound.The protagonist Valentine must come to terms with her past and with her family when her estranged father Ray and his step son Luis return to North Carolina so that Ray can die there. Val's mother Tess, a delightful free spirit, must deal with her ex-husband and their own past. Tess is the catalyst for some of the novel's most interesting misadventures. Valentine must deal with a dying father, her father's step son, and her wacky mother as she learns the secrets of her own past. As the title implies, Val is gifted with an unusual sense of smell which gives her unique insights into the personalities and emotions of those around her. Adams conveys this olfactory sense effectively, especially since our language has comparatively few words that relate to smells.
The Southern Gothic elements of the book seem to reflect influences from William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Erskine Caldwell. the multiple first-person perspectives are reminiscent of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, though this novel is more accessible. The religious elements of the novel, especially those revolving around the Catholic Church, recall some of O'Connor's fiction. And finally the delightfully macabre sense of humor may reflect the influence Caldwell's novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.
Overall, This Is What It Smells Like is an entertaining and sometimes profound book. It will leave the reader with a thoughtful smile, wishing for more.
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This Is What It Smells Like edition by Cathy Adams Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Adam’s This Is What It Smells Like captivates the reader with a unique setting and characters along with vivid detail that makes her storytelling lucid and engaging. The protagonist with a psychic smelling abilities and her mother provide a fresh take on smart and complex women somehow inextricably connected to earth even as they reside in an urban, tree-lined street right across from the local college. Adams keeps the mother, a slightly atypical hippie artist, earth bond with the motif of shoes and bare footedness – I lost track at more than twenty references to the character’s shoes and feet. Even with this traditionally feminine reference, Adams keeps the theme fresh with descriptions of an ornamental Christmas version of the Virgin Mary who ends up in socks of sand and a perplexed character who “…would stare down at his feet as if the answer was woven into his shoe laces.” The book’s distinctively powerful female characters echoed the likes found in other southern authors Kate Chopin, Melanie Sumner, Truman Capote, and Sharyn McCrumb.
And, like Falkner or Franklin, in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Adams flips the narrative around to a variety of points of view. This device begins mid-novel and while at first startling, it gives the story momentum that may have waned otherwise. Fresh metaphors keep the reading lively as well. A silent man clears his throat during a group conversation; “I think this was his way of inserting himself into the conversation in much the same way a person does when he leaves his coat on his seat to maintain his place while he goes to the restroom.” A child describes alarm at seeing beneath his father’s shirt the pale and vulnerable belly and compares it to the soft underside of dog’s hindquarters. Stained cement porch steps become a pristine stack of coconut cake slices. A woman is depicted, “like a shrunken grandmother someone left parked on the lawn after the birthday party ended.” The self-conscious protagonist, jealous of a new relative when he introduces a song to her, reflects, “I didn’t want him to think he was playing this for me the for the first time, to take on that self-important tone people get when they thing they own something because they are the only ones who have experienced it, and they end up taking psychic credit for it as if they were responsible for its making.” And, like much southern writing, the element of religion is wrought throughout the story, in an analytical way – much like an atheist who lives in the south works to justify their position through the spiritual vacuum and piousness created by churches.
Adams novel is a worth a read. And, long afterwards, it will leave you wondering what illusive feelings and multifaceted attitudes smell like.
This book is about a girl with a seemingly supernaturally enhanced sense of smell. E.G, she can smell people's feeling and such things. For her, everything has a smell. Thus the title of the book. While I like the story a lot, I found the sense of smell to be superfluous and I think I would have liked the story better without it. This may be just me, but I think the author may have read some books by Murakami or other modern authors who make their bones off of mixing in supernatural or paranormal elements and wanted to try it herself. I won't dwell on that too much. The sense of smell is cute and charming, but I feel the story could have been more powerful if it was more fully grounded in reality.
As for the story itself, it started out slow for me, but by a third of the way through the book, I was hooked and I was looking for time to read it more. The different chapters are told from different characters' points of view, so it feels like multiple intertwining stories more than one story. There's a good chance one of the characters will resonate with you. This book really gives you a chance to be in different characters minds, and the characters feel like real people too.
Valentine Day Winter smells things, we only dream about. Unlike Adam K, I think Val's sense of smell is the most endearing part of the novel. I was a little disappointed when the point of view shifted to other people and I couldn't get the rolling olfactory insights.
What a strange family. They are really unique characters but all are very well developed and it is an extremely good story. You will feel like you know each character personally by the time you finish this book. I am not good at writing reviews-I think the five stars says it all.
This Is What It Smells Like, the recently published first novel by Cathy Adams is a delightful read, filled with the best traditions of Southern Gothic fiction. The novel's quirky, interesting characters lead lives which run the gamut from wacky to profound.
The protagonist Valentine must come to terms with her past and with her family when her estranged father Ray and his step son Luis return to North Carolina so that Ray can die there. Val's mother Tess, a delightful free spirit, must deal with her ex-husband and their own past. Tess is the catalyst for some of the novel's most interesting misadventures. Valentine must deal with a dying father, her father's step son, and her wacky mother as she learns the secrets of her own past. As the title implies, Val is gifted with an unusual sense of smell which gives her unique insights into the personalities and emotions of those around her. Adams conveys this olfactory sense effectively, especially since our language has comparatively few words that relate to smells.
The Southern Gothic elements of the book seem to reflect influences from William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Erskine Caldwell. the multiple first-person perspectives are reminiscent of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, though this novel is more accessible. The religious elements of the novel, especially those revolving around the Catholic Church, recall some of O'Connor's fiction. And finally the delightfully macabre sense of humor may reflect the influence Caldwell's novels such as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.
Overall, This Is What It Smells Like is an entertaining and sometimes profound book. It will leave the reader with a thoughtful smile, wishing for more.
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