Nanci Kincaid’s novel, As Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me,
is firmly in the genre of coming-of-age tales from small towns in the south of
the USA.  The Jacksons live in rural
Florida, in Pinetta where everyone knows everyone else.   The children are thirteen-year-old Berry
and her brothers Sowell and Wade who live in close quarters.  Her parents have a stormy relationship.  Their father is the principal at the town
school and he has to deal with all the families to keep their children in
class.  Their mother is close to Pastor
Butch Lyons, and so when one Sunday it is announced in church that he has been
having an affair with another woman, she is very upset.  She gets Berry to fake illness so they can
travel together to the city on the pretext of visiting the doctor, but in fact
to meet Lyons who has gone back to living with his mother.  But the main event of the novel is a huge
storm that tears the town apart, during which Berry’s father drives off with a
local girl and completely disappears. 

It is Berry who narrates the
novel, and she is a winning character with burgeoning sexuality and plenty of
insight into other people’s motives.  It
isn’t exactly clear what in time period the story is set but it feels a few
decades ago, in a place sheltered from modern trends.  It also makes the location feel very backward, almost in the
nineteenth century, especially when a chain gang starts working near Berry’s
house.  The frequent appearance of
snakes and the demolition of the school in the tornado add an almost biblical
tone.  These elements add to the charm
of the book, even if they run the risk of seeming rather affected.  The central question, what has happened to
Berry’s vanished father, holds the threads of the story together, but in the
end it is much more about Berry’s emerging independence.  She starts out as a shorthaired tomboy but
she develops a crush on one of the prisoners working out front, and she becomes
the confident of other characters, and so she tells the story of her move into
adolescence. 

As
Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me is a pleasure to read, even
if it doesn’t offer any great insights. 
The events are extraordinary, but the characters are expertly sketched
and so their actions are believable and hold the readers interest.  The family dynamics are the greatest
strength of the novel, especially with the tension between the children and
their mother when she starts to develop a relationship with a new man.  Some readers may question the depiction of
Berry’s sexual encounters at the end of the story, which are treated quite
lightly, but by that point she has been firmly enough established for her
actions and feelings to at least be understandable.

Link: Publisher’s website for book

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved. 

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of
the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at
Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online
Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine,
psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction