Reviews for The Oysterback tales

The average rating for The Oysterback tales based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-17 00:00:00 Kevin Lansing Oh, to live in Oysterback, Maryland. Helen Chappell's fictional Eastern Shore hamlet is the kind of place that many of us who love the Delmarva Peninsula dream of ending up -- a quiet, out-of-the-way town where everyone knows everyone, and everyone tolerates everyone else's little eccentricities -- because, naturally, everyone has a charming little eccentricity or two of his or her own. Oysterback is, in short, a literary creation that does not pretend to documentary or photographic realism, but is a charming place in which to spend some time for that very reason. In The Oysterback Tales, Helen Chappell provides a fun, discursive, impressionistic series of sketches, anecdotes, and purported news items from the local paper, the Oysterback Bugeye -- all of which combine to draw a pleasant picture of life in Chappell's fictional town of Oysterback. A helpful preface from Harold Piper, then opinion/commentary editor for the Baltimore Sun, recounts the process by which Chappell came to submit a series of short, 800- to 1000-word sketches for publication in the Sun. The preface also lets us know that Chappell's Oysterback tales were not universally favored across Delmarva; as Chappell puts it, "Some Eastern Shore folk take offense at anything. Talbot County, for instance, is famous for having absolutely no sense of humor about itself" (viii). Whether you agree with that statement or not may depend on whether or not you are from Talbot County. The sketches are short and make for easy reading. The characters are colorful and are drawn in a swift, economical way; one of my favorites is "Professor Shepherd, who lost his tenure over to the college [Salisbury? Maryland-Eastern Shore? Washington College?] and has to live on his boat out back", and whom one often sees "at the bar making notes for the book he says he's going to write about us all" (p. 25). Whether one is taking in the town's annual Mosquito Festival or the ever-changing menu at Desiree Grinch's Blue Crab Tavern, life in Oysterback is never dull. Most of the tales are told in a jocular spirit, with wildly exaggerated character names and situations; but some are more somber, such as a chapter titled "Floater," a moving tribute to the risks taken by watermen and others who work the often-dangerous waters of Chesapeake Bay. And the chapter "Ferrus T. Buckett Deals With Hard Times" is a devastating satire of nouveau-riche big-city tourists who invade Delmarva in overpriced cars, regard the ordinary Eastern Shore resident "as if he were a particularly unappealing insect" (p. 9), and treat the culture of the Shore as if it were just another commodity that could be purchased. I would regard Chappell's picture of this phenomenon as overdrawn if I hadn't seen people from the great metropolitan areas of the East misbehaving in just this way, so many times, in so many small Delmarva towns. The Oysterback Tales is remarkably short (115 pages), and provides a most pleasant literary day-trip to the Eastern Shore, for all those who are disposed to make the journey.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-29 00:00:00 Pat Sebert Amusing Eastern Shore stories, written for Baltimore Sun. Liked it.