The Tall Pine Polka is my final book for Re-Readathon 2026 – a comfort re-read and a book I annotated. It had been a long time since I had read this last, since 2013 in fact. My experience this time wasn’t quite the same as it had previously been. I remained mostly interested in the interpersonal relationships of the denizens of the Cup O’Delight cafe, especially the ones between Fenny, Lee, and Bill. But this time some of the hiccups of this book being published 27 years ago jumped out at me more than they previously had.
The reason this has been a comfort read for me is that it blends the fantastic (everything to do with the movie production and Fenny’s casting in it) with the more every day. This book reads the way life plays out, once you take being discovered by Hollywood out of the equation. We’ve all experienced grief in its various forms, we’ve known someone with an abusive spouse, someone you love who isn’t telling you the whole story, a job you likely weren’t completely qualified for but managed to get anyway, and knowing that you’ve missed someone’s heart along the way. Out here in the world all those things make a life. In the book, Fenny and the rest of these well-drawn characters experience the same. With a bit of storytelling panache.
The book has always had drawbacks that I’ve seen and acknowledged – it’s sometimes disjointed; many of the characterizations are over the top with a few verging on downright parody. This time the reader I am now versus the reader I was 13 years ago came into stark relief with how I recoiled at the gendered fatphobia and shame that are placed on the character of Lee. I remember always being a bit uncomfortable with it, since the descriptions of her didn’t align with the way in which her size is held against her, especially in comparison to Bill. This time the misogyny of the late 1990s was impossible to miss, and it reminded me how much more body inclusivity has been normalized in the intervening decades (with bumps along the way of course). I also bumped on the PTSD representation here, but I have much less personal experience to comment on it with.
But with that enormous asterisk to my experience, this book also has important things to say about grief, hope, and bravery, and not boxing ourselves into prescribed notions of who we are and how we should be. Just take any body descriptions of the female characters with an enormous grain of salt and a deep sigh acknowledging the ridiculous body standards this book also bought into.
Bingo Space: One. This is a standalone book.
Bingo: Left, One, You, Or, Repair (Four Corners and Center)
