Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
I have not read a biography of Dolly Parton before and of course have read about parts of her life here and there, but never in one sitting. I have to say that I thought overall this was well written, though in the end it felt like the book was rushing through things.
Ain’t Nobody’s Fool walks the reader from Dolly Parton’s humble beginnings, how she eventually left her hometown for Nashville, how she met her late husband, and the beginnings of her musical career.
Dolly Parton has had and continues to have an extraordinary life and I thought at times I only got to know the surface level of her life. I really wish we had gotten more details. For example, we hear a bit about her health issues, but I still felt confused what was going on exactly there, and then we jump to her being depressed, and even suicidal, but then it just jumped to a new subject. I wish that Martha Ackmann had just let us linger with those moments and provide us with something deeper. For example, we just get surface level on Dolly’s health issues, her businesses that failed, her movies, etc. We get a line or two, but it seems as if it happened and she didn’t dwell on them, but then pages later we would get a line about it again. I also just wanted to know her thoughts more than we got when she got criticized for standing up for Black Lives Matter.
I know that Ackmann is an essayist and at times it felt like I was reading one. I also think the chapters closing with notes and having to click on those for more details took me out of the reading a bit too much as well.
I was also surprised to say that when I got through the whole book there wasn’t a lot there (84 percent was when the book finished via my Kindle reader) and then the rest was the notes in their own separate section. I assume that was for people that didn’t want to click on them when reading and wreck their reading flow. My last surprise too was there were no photos.
