Deal, Babs A., The Walls Came Tumbling Down. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968.
The Walls Came Tumbling Down is very much a late 1960s book. In the beginning I wasn’t sure I would get into it or even like it. It is the story of seven sorority sisters still living in the same small town, still friends as adults. Their friendships are tested when a skeleton of an infant is found in a wall of their sorority house. An investigation would prove the baby was hidden during a renovation that happened during a summer when only those same seven young women were living in the house – twenty-four years earlier. The majority of Deal’s book is filled with busybody gossip, small town snobbery and the uncovering of many secrets besides a hidden pregnancy and birth. Adulterous affairs, the inability to trust one another, and the growing suspicions and prejudices are all brought to light when literally and figuratively, the walls come down.
My favorite line: “I do not want to believe I fell in love with a smile” (p 56).
One of the most telling viewpoints of the times: “His secretary was Miss Wilson. She had been an airline hostess until she got too old. She was thirty-two: (p 109). Thirty-two is too old? Yikes?
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Southern-Fried Fiction (Alabama)” (p 206).
ps~ I found it interesting that Babs Deal had a small obsession with what kind of cars her characters drove.
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