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...alinear story, which ultimately tumbles like the Tower of Babel under its heavy pedanticness. Davidson, a poet, should not quit her day job. Although the language of The Priest Fainted is eloquent enough, the alinearity simply gets tire-some, as do her pathetic attempts to compare herself--the reader can safely presume that the 19-year old narrator is a version of Davidson in disguise--to various Greek goddesses...
...main problems with this novel lie in the fact that Davidson does not know how to engage a reader. While Like Water For Chocolate, a book which Davidson has heavily imitated with her food-as-culture-and-identity-and-feminism theme, had charm and humor, as well as a concrete plot, the plot of The Priest Fainted can be summed up in one sentence: 19 year-old Greek-American girl travels to Greece, makes some friends, has adventurous sex and realizes why her mother decided not to marry a Greek man (because like all men, they, too, are pigs). Coherence...
...cooking the sensual, traditional Greek dish Iman Baildi, which in English means "the priest fainted," hence the title of this book. Although this sounds like a delicious food, its significance in the novel is never fully developed. In fact, the food genre is quickly dropped, which can confuse a reader who thought this novel would be about taking a culinary journey into Greece and getting some heart-to-heart searching along the way. Instead, the novel delves superficially into many "modern" themes and experiences, and the plot line--already thinner than a slice of processed American cheese--doesn't fare...
...difficult to be touched by this novel. The narrator may get on the reader's nerves all or most of the time, but the true story of The Priest Fainted actually revolves around the narrator's mother, who travels back to Greece to meet her adolescent best friend and to spend time with her daughter. The best part of the book is when the narrator's mother and her best friend meet again after over thirty years, and are afraid to face each other because they do not want to part with the past, when they were young, beautiful...
...helpless, Lidie decides to cut her hair, disguise herself as a boy, and travel to Missouri to find Thomas' murderers. Despite the incredible danger she knows she is getting into, her good sense always keeps the upper hand. "Sentiment was a deadly thing in K.T.," she explains to the reader. "Folks back in the U.S. didn't know that about K.T., did they?" The adventures that follow, including an attempted escape north with a woman in slavery, are told with such honest simplicity that to try and recount them here would be to extinguish the spark they carry...