Ohio Town:A Portrait of Xenia, Ohio

Ohio is such a beautiful state – heart-shaped (the signs at the state line say “Ohio – The Heart of It All!”), with the Ohio River forming its entire southern border. Its small towns are particularly pleasant places – neat little rectilinear communities nestled among the tidy farms, rolling hills, and meandering waterways of the Buckeye State. And judging from Ohio Town, Helen Hooven Santmyer’s appealing memoir about growing up in the southwest Ohio community of Xenia, an Ohio town i [...]

Non-fiction,recollections of the author's youth in her beloved Xenia,Ohio.Santmyer, born in 1895 writes of her memories of the the town,her childhood and warm,sunset memories of a town that no longer exists as she knew. Xenia was heavily damaged in a tornado in 1974.Written prior to 1962 she has captured important historical facts of the town as it originated before her birth and thru her youth.So many of her memories rekindled some of my own from life in the 1950's and 60's,and I can't help but [...]

I'm very torn on this book. At first I could not put it down but I quickly got bored. It was initially fascinating because it was such a detailed accounting of what a small-ish Ohio town was like 50 - 100 years ago. But the author's writing made it impossible for me to keep up interest. It was so dry and there was no story to the book. Just a lot of descriptions but there was nothing really holding them all together in a narrative.

Being about a small town, this book is not surprisingly, rather slow moving, but it is a book to be savored for the beauty of the prose that reads almost like poetry. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

You have to read this every few years to remember how beautiful language can be.

Pretty dry. I had a hard time following the descriptions of houses, streets, etc. But it's a good reference for small town Americana so I'll probably keep it around.

Having since the disturbing film Gummo, I have often wondered about the Xenia, Ohio from before the April 3, 1974 F5 tornadocut a path directly through the middle of Xenia during the 1974 Super Outbreak, the second largest series of tornadoes in recorded history, and destroyed almost half of the city's buildings. This does that, first published 1956 and looking back to a Nineteenth Century "'60s" and "'70s" and when authored recalled grandfatherly denizens that were Civil War veterans. Wistful, [...]