Sadly this was a DNF for me.
I just couldn’t get into the storyline. It did not engage with me.
This book wasn’t for me

Tiffany McDaniel's Betty is a powerful novel, with some traumatic scenes of cruelty, racism and poverty. However, the overwhelming feeling it left me with was a life-affirming hopefulness. A beautiful book.

I've tried to write this review numerous times, but all I've managed is word vomit. There is no succinct way I can describe how truly wonderful, yet soul crushing this book is. If you've read it, then you'll understand.
Tiffany McDaniel knows how to take you to the edge of what you think you can emotionally bear then tip you over into a no man's land of despair, and I love her for it!

For me this book above all else was about Betty' s relationship with her Father, Landon, their bond was so unique and special. With every story he wove into their everday lives of their Cherokee ancestry and the role of nature in the world I could feel myself welling up with love. At the end I couldn't help but think of the relationship with my own Father and the tears I shed were as much for him as the characters.

There is huge amounts of trauma in this book and it's hard to imagine that these things happened to the authors own family, but it's that honesty that builds so much trust with the reader and I know no matter what Tiffany McDaniel writes in the future I'm in safe hands. She will show you all the grotesque parts of the world but she will wrap it up in the most beautiful imagery you've ever read. She's a master of the metaphor and a genius manipulator of words, I admire her so much.

I know this doesn't tell you a lot about the actual book, but all you need to know is that it will leave you heart sore. You will think about it obsessively. You will leak happy and sad tears. But you won't want it to end! It's sheer perfection. Put all other books aside and read it now.

An absolute wonder of a book. A difficult but important read covering topics such the importance of family, race and abuse. I have been shoving this book in the hands of friends since I read it!

Review hadn’t saved. Really enjoyed this one- writing what fantastic and drew me in, didn’t want it to end! Powerful and emotional read!

Stunning.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

At times horribly dark and heart breaking, this is nonetheless one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I will be thinking about this incredible book for a very long time. Its unlike anything else I've read.

Beautiful and heart-breaking…
An utterly magnificent novel which is filled with both a vast sense of sadness and unrelenting joy and strength that breaks through. Betty is the coming-of-age story of a half Cherokee girl (with a white mother and Cherokee father) who is forced to navigate racist and misogynist abuse and carry heavy burdens throughout her life. The challenges she faces are juxtaposed with McDaniel’s poetic and ethereal prose which beautifully captures the mythical Cherokee folklore and the lush Appalachian Mountains.

Betty’s relationship with her father is at the heart of the story and is the best father-daughter relationship I’ve ever encountered in any book. This was not an easy book to read & I recommend checking out the trigger warnings before picking up a copy. If you do feel able to read Betty, I thoroughly recommend that you do – my review cannot do it justice. A new favourite book for me which will stay with me for a long time.

As I get older I've naturally become more curious about my family history and I've felt the urge to record this personal lineage before it's lost or forgotten. Of course, everyone's family story is unique to them but Tiffany McDaniel's is one that felt wholly new and bracingly honest to me. She's fictionally reimagined her mother's story in the artfully composed and extremely moving novel “Betty”. With her mixture of white and Cherokee ancestry, Betty has darker skin so stands out from the crowd. She's frequently teased and tormented in the rural area of Appalachia she grows up in during the 1960s. Additionally, she's made aware of the perilous vulnerability of women and girls who are frequently the targets of sexual abuse within their community. In telling her mother's story, McDaniel has memorialised not only the creativity, resilience and spirit of her direct lineage but also the conflicts and struggle of a whole community that's not often represented in literature, television or the media. She poignantly shows the way prejudice and a culture of silence is passed down through generations and thus perpetuates abuse and violence. But she also evokes the particular personalities of Betty, her siblings and her parents in such a compelling way that I felt intimately drawn into this family and fell in love with their story.

One of the most affecting aspects of this novel is the way storytelling itself is woven into the lives of the characters. Betty's father relates the mythological traditions he's inherited to his children while also conjuring his own stories about their place in the natural world. Some characters scoff at these considering them to be simply tall tales, but Betty surmises their deeper importance: “Dad says so. That means it's true... I realized then that not only did Dad need us to believe his stories, we needed to believe them as well. To believe in unripe stars and eagles able to do extraordinary things. What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny that we did not feel cursed to.” The way that the larger community diminishes their family (Betty and her father in particular) means that these stories form a more meaningful and substantial reality than the one they exist in.

As Betty interacts with more slighted and marginal figures in the town she discovers many more people have their own hidden stories and legacies. This hits closer to home when she discovers the way her mother and sister have been secretly abused. The fact of their rape is shocking but so is the way it darkly affects their personalities. While her father is naturally gregarious and loveable, I found myself initially angry at the mother for the rough way she treats Betty. But I developed more sympathy for her as it becomes clear this is a consequence of the way the mother hasn't been able to deal with or voice the trauma she's experienced. Equally, I found Betty's sister Flossie such a compelling character as her vanity is initially charming and then takes a darker turn as her pretensions make her turn her back on her family. But, ultimately, it's tragic the way Flossie is unable to reinvent herself in the way she desires. The way McDaniel shows how private suffering is often turned inward and forms self-destructive behaviour in a variety of individuals is very powerful.

This novel is both a reckoning and a testament. When we begin to realise the challenges and strife our ancestors suffered (and sometimes didn't survive) the fact of our existence can feel like a kind of miracle. “Betty” is a very special personal story that speaks to this in the way it skilfully evokes a lost world and distinct individuals that shouldn't be forgotten.

Tiffany McDaniels' Betty is a book like no other, and it is the one that will probably leave me the last out of all the books I read this year. Every page is touched by honesty and heartbreak (the breadth of the novel taken from the life of McDaniel's mother): it whirled and swirled, ebbed and flowed, and managed to place magic and misery into the early life of a girl who knew too much.

“My heart is made of glass”

Oh Dear! That’s another full packet of tissues all used up, and I’m still a soggy broken heap!

I feel as though I have been on a terrifying journey which I didn’t particularly enjoy, which made me cringe, hang my head in shame, stirred my anger on more than one occasion, and yet a journey which I didn’t want to have to wake from and leave behind, with my many questions still unanswered.

What can I say about the sheer and stunning bravery of this story? How author, Tiffany McDaniel was able to put pen to paper and so maturely and masterfully record this heart-breaking family history, is beyond my emotional understanding and I have nothing but total respect and admiration for her and her mother, Betty.

I see this book as a work of important social, cultural and historical, literary fiction. Whether Tiffany would like it to be remembered as a work of fiction, a memoir dedicated to her mother, or a concept reflection of self-actualization, or maybe a little of each, is almost irrelevant in the scheme of things, so powerful a story that it is.

I feel almost voyeuristic in analysing life within this vulnerable family and these the pages of their tormented story, especially as I wouldn’t want to even begin to pass comment or judgement on any single conversation or event, which might be more fact than fiction; not knowing where fact stops and fiction begins, or vice versa.

Written throughout in the voice of a young Betty, this is truly and honestly, a coming of age story for her, although I felt that she was coming of age almost every day of her life, given the horrendous events she bore witness to, all the secrets she felt compelled to keep and the rollercoaster of emotions she had to quell and keep buried, to ensure that her dysfunctional family remained together, if not united, for as long as possible. To relieve some of the terrible tension and stress about the many things she had seen and heard, which no child should be subjected to, or the burden of others’ guilt she had to carry on her young shoulders, Betty writes everything down, usually as stories, which she then buries, but always safely, so that she can revisit them when daily life gets too much for her to bear and events from the past come back to haunt her anew.

Betty’s Cherokee father, Landon, is the bedrock of the family for Betty, and the axis on which it turns on a daily basis. Being the only one of his six living children who looks like him and is so akin to him in his outlook on life and family, Betty is so completely in tune with him, that I wondered just how many secrets there really were between them and how much Landon actually knew, but chose to close his eyes to, for fear of being overwhelmed, by the reality of his family’s life as it really was. Landon is Betty’s teacher about the ways of the past and her forefathers. He teaches both her and her siblings about their relationship with the land and how it can best provide for them. He tells stories which transport them to worlds miles away from the reality of their deprivation. That he loves them all and would lay down his own life for any one of them, is undoubted and unspoken, however they are all hanging on to life and family by the thinnest of thread and Betty’s mother, Alka is unable to offer little, if any, support to any one of them, especially Landon, so drowning is she in her own deep-seated grief, anger and despair.

There are one or two lighter moments, when to the innocent and unknowing bystander, life might almost appear ‘normal’ in the Carpenter household. However, gingerly begin to unpeel those tissue thin layers and the veneer begins to unravel quite quickly, into the chaos and heartache, which makes up everyday life. I have never come across a family with so many secrets, lies, deceit, self-denial, self-loathing and hatred, at its very core.

Alka is very much at the centre of each tragedy as it unfolds, as it is from her that the very core and essence of this family drama stems. At times I could have shaken her, for her lethargy, her unwillingness to interact with her children and offer them any motherly guidance, and her inability to contribute to the family unit in any tangible way, shape or form. Maybe if she had felt able to communicate with Landon, some of the tragedy might have been avoided, because I truly think he would have understood and probably supported her through her most difficult times. But as it is, I realise that she is simply a broken human being, both physically and mentally and who, unable to deal with life any more, continues to shut down at an alarming rate, as her condition deteriorates. Therefore, I think partially out of spite and partly because she simply doesn’t know what else to do, or where to turn, her innermost, most terrible secrets and thoughts are all placed firmly and squarely at Betty’s door, the youngest of her daughters, the one she resents the most because of her likeness to her father and the one she therefore chooses to burden, and against whom all of her vitriol and hate is directed.

This is a story of deprivation and abuse, written completely from the heart, with total confidence, authority and a desperate intensity, forming a narrative and dialogue which is compelling, vulnerable, yet truly lyrical in its quality. The intense enduring pain which emanates from this family is visceral, raw, gripping and disturbing, as they are each intent on self destruction and unable to comprehend the emotional and physical damage they are inflicting on themselves and everyone around them.

The wider detail outside the family home seems almost trivial by comparison, however not to tell of the small town prejudice, discrimination, verbal and physical abuse heaped upon the family as a whole, but Betty in particular, would be to allow people in authority, who should know better, to think they have got away with their bigoted beliefs and ideologies, and that would never do!

They do say that the ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons’ and if you read this story right until the end, you will learn exactly what I mean. In the final devastating twist, it transpires that from one brutal, humiliating, depraved assault, perpetuated and repeated over many years, eight people’s lives are changed irrevocably forever. Only three will survive this maelstrom which spiralled out of control and engulfed them all, but what of them? – I guess only Tiffany really knows the answer to that question! However I became so invested in this story and the characters, that I would like to think that there is a small glimmer of hope for Betty and maybe a little peace in her final days for Alka, whilst Leland is in the right place for God to dish out the retribution he sees fit!!

Betty about a young Cherokee girl and her family growing up in poverty in 1950’s America. I absolutely loved this book! It’s poignant and heartbreaking but also utterly uplifting. It’s not always easy to read and some of the subject matter could be triggering but I would urge anyone to read it if they get a chance

My book of the year, without a doubt. Such incredible writing and the most memorable and wonderful characters. I adored the relationship between Betty and her father, and I sobbed through the last 80 or so pages. It does have some almost unnecessarily dark scenes in it however, which is the only thing that prevents me from thrusting it into the hands of every customer. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to read it again and again, and I will be recommending it a LOT. This book has my whole heart!

However - PLEASE do something with the cover for the paperback. It just isn't right - it makes it look light and fluffy and I would never have picked it up on this cover alone.

Could not read this book - only read a couple of chapters, and either not for me or not in the mood.

Betty, what a beautiful book. Sweet, sour and to my mind courageous.
I was not sure for the first chapter then the book pulled me in to enjoy the Cherokee tales and customs mixed up with the story of a family fighting against the odds for survival and acceptance.
The star is Landon, the most thoughtful and kind Father, he can make a tragic happening into a moral lesson by weaving a tale or show people the positive side of sadness. He carves keepsakes and makes potions to keep everyone as happy as possible.
Life for the Carpenters is always a struggle to grow enough food to feed themselves and for Landon to hold down a job in the face of racism and cruelty. Bettys first day at school is horrific and stays that way all through her schooling, her sister Freya tries to help but her other sister Flossie ignores her. The personalities of her siblings are all well described and their reasons for their actions and attitudes are gradually disclosed. Betty's mother is a complex and at times a hateful, cruel person, when we learn of her past, we understand her bitterness but want her to overcome it and nurture her own children.
Thank you Tiffany and NetGalley, for an inspiring read.

Vivid storytelling, memorable characters. The sort of historical novel that takes you to that moment and through its characters teaches you about that place and historical moment. Empathetic and beautiful.

I did struggle with this story as I was confused throughout the majority of the book. However a great exploration of themes surrounding sexuality and womanhood. Just not for me unfortunately.

Beautifully written, extremely emotional, and absolutely horrific. I couldn't put this down, and since reading have been constantly thinking about it.

"Betty' is one of those once in a lifetime books that you will truly never forget, I have never loved a character more, her narrative voice was as soft as honey, the story was earthy and raw and beautiful and sad and I cried and laughed along with these people that I truly never wanted to leave, who I miss now I have finished. Please treat yourself to a copy ASAP you will not be disappointed!

A deeply intriguing novel about womanhood, pain, and storytelling. The power of storytelling and the magical escape that it offers Betty – allowing her to survive under such difficult and painful circumstances – is at the heart of McDaniel’s novel. This is a brutal portrayal of how the stories we create can offer us the courage to find the light even in the darkest of times. It’s not a light read, and there is a lot of emotion within the story, which is hard at times to get through, but overall this novel is powerful and moving.