The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop is Fannie Flagg's 2020 sequel to her bestselling 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was itself the basis for the even-more-popular 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes). Like its predecessor, the novel jumps between past and present, weaving a web of connections between old friends and new.
Set in 2019, the novel concerns the continuing adventures of Bud Threadgoode, an irrepressible one-armed octogenarian whose Dying Wish to revisit the tiny Alabama town where he spent his happiest years triggers a series of long-shot coincidences, near-misses, and revelations into the past.
Ruthie Threadgoode Caldwell, the Generation Xerox granddaughter of Ruth Jamison, is reeling from the sudden death of her dashing young husband Brooks, while simultaneously stuck under the thumb of her controlling, social-climbing mother-in-law Martha Lee. When Ruthie's father Bud pulls a runner from his retirement home, Ruthie makes a frantic journey across state lines to find him. There she meets Evelyn Couch, the main character from Fried Green Tomatoes, who has a whole new attitude thanks to her old friend Ninny. Ruthie desperately needs a Ninny in her life, and since the original is long gone, Evelyn decides to step up. Armed with a shoebox full of old photographs and recipes, Evelyn, Ruthie, and Bud go in search of a town that doesn't exist anymore, except in the hearts and memories of those who lived there.
And then there's Idgie Threadgoode, who still has a powerful influence on the people who loved her, and who may not quite be done causing trouble, even from beyond the grave.
The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop provides examples of these tropes:
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account:
- Since the previous novel, Evelyn has had a series of successful careers. Now retired, she has more money than she knows what to do with—enough, in fact, to fund two virtual strangers in their dream of purchasing an entire town even though in the end, it turns out she doesn't have to.
- Martha Lee is fabulously wealthy both through her family and her husband's business, so much so that while restoring her historical home, she brags that she doesn't even look at prices because money doesn't matter when her only concern is bringing the house back to its original grandeur, a fact that comes back to bite her when it turns out she's broke.
- At the end of the novel, the comfortably middle-class Bud falls in love with a woman who modestly declines to mention she's the heiress of the Coca-Cola empire until after he proposes.
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: In the course of a single night, Idgie loses over $500note , her car, her watch, and the café, half of which isn't even hers, to Arvell Ligget. In an eleventh hour stroke of luck, she wins everything back, plus a deed that will eventually make her sole owner of the town of Whistle Stop. She never gambles again.
- The Alcoholic: Idgie. While she tries to play it off as being a Hard-Drinking Party Girl, in fact, she's developed a serious problem. The only thing that convinces her to find help is when Ruth leaves her for it.
- Asshole Victim: Arvell Ligget.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Arvell Ligget gets revenge on Idgie for humiliating him by shooting one of her cats.
- Big Fancy House: Evelyn's new digs. Her guesthouse has two bedrooms, a Jacuzzi, and its own pool.
- Big Fun: In the previous book, Evelyn was particularly unhappy about her size. Here she's learned to embrace it: all her friends and business associates talk about how exuberant she is and how much fun she is to be around. Once she makes friends with Ruthie, she's constantly dragging her off for spa days, fancy dinners, and spontaneous getaways to Las Vegas or Hawaii.
- Brainy Brunette: Dark-haired Ruthie, whose college roommate complains it isn't fair that she has to share a room with the most beautiful, most popular, and the smartest girl on campus.
- Cool Car: Evelyn once owned a car dealership and has a whole fleet of shiny Cadillacs, one of which she offers to loan Ruthie (whom she's never even met before) as casually as loaning her a dollar for coffee.
- Cool Old Lady: Since the previous book, Evelyn's gone from humble housewife to millionaire mogul.
- Needless to say Idgie remained a cool old lady until she was a dead old lady.
- Deep South: The majority of the story takes place in Alabama, with forays into Georgia and Florida.
- Demoted to Extra: Evelyn was the main character of the first novel but is pretty much the Sixth Ranger in the sequel: she doesn't really show up until about the halfway point and the story is much more focused on Ruthie and Bud.
- Disappeared Dad: Bud never knew why his father was never part of his life growing up, or why his mother never talked about him.
- Double-Meaning Title: We find out in the first chapter that "wonder boy" was Bud's nickname as a kid—not because of any spectacular feat, but because he was always wondering about things. By the end, he's an old man, the last surviving resident of Whistle Stop, and he turns out to be pretty wondrous after all.
- Fluffy the Terrible: One day Bud tells his daughter that he's adopted "a kitty." It turns out to be a hulking, vicious marmalade tabby the size of a bobcat, who hates everyone except Bud. At one point it tries to eat a housemaid.
- Friend to All Living Things: Idgie, who brought home every kind of critter, including an injured juvenile alligator. This trait is mentioned in the first book, but is much more played up in the sequel as the reason for Bud becoming a veterinarian.
- Generation Xerox: Ruthie is the spitting image of her grandmother, Ruth Jamison, but she's never even seen a picture of Ruth until Evelyn arrives with her shoebox.
- The Great Depression: Whistle Stop's heyday, and the setting for many of the flashback sequences.
- Ghost Town: Whistle Stop no longer exists. After the last resident left, the town was reclaimed by woods.
- Greek Chorus: Dot Weems' Weems Weekly, which she continued to publish long after leaving Whistle Stop, functions as one of these.
- Groin Attack: When Arvell shoots one of Idgie's many cats, she returns the favor with a barrel of buckshot. She was aiming for his ass, but he turned around at just the wrong moment...
- I'm Going to Disney World!: When Idgie gets hold of Ruth's six-year-old granddaughter for the first time, she wastes no time in taking her to the Happiest Place on Earth.
- Informed Ability: Ruthie is stated to be academically brilliant, but she never has a career of her own and is so downtrodden that she allows other people to make all her decisions for her. While obviously, it's possible for a very smart person to be weak-willed, and while many people end up with college educations they never use, the book spends a significant amount of time explaining how Ruthie is the total package of brains and beauty, only for neither attribute to be relevant.
- I Own This Town: A rare non-corrupt example: Idgie, who in her old age is so involved in goings-on of her tiny town of Kissimmee, Florida, that no one would ever dream of doing something without consulting her first. Eventually they give up and make her mayor. Then of course, there's the fact that she literally owns Whistle Stop.
- It Was with You All Along: In this case, quite literally. With Evelyn's financial assistance, Ruthie and Bud plan to revitalize Whistle Stop, but no one seems to know who owns the land or how much they'll have to pay to get it back. Turns out Idgie won Whistle Stop in a poker game 80 years ago, and when she died, Bud unknowingly inherited it.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Martha Lee constantly boasts of her family's Old Money, and she's particularly proud of an ancestor who was genuine English aristocracy. It isn't until the end of the book that she learns her husband secretly mortgaged their house in an unsuccessful bid to save his failing business, leaving her without the house or the business when he dies. Meanwhile the aristocratic ancestor is actually an unrelated woman with the same surname, and her real Lee ancestor was a Chinese gardener.
- Poor Communication Kills: A nervous secretary at the retirement home calls Ruthie to tell her that they lost her father that morning under suspicious circumstances and the police are involved. Ruthie, terrified that someone murdered her father, rushes there to discover that her father's not dead; they just can't find him.
- Minor related incident: The same secretary tries to explain to police that Bud has one arm but occasionally wears a prosthesis. She does such a poor job that the resulting APB states to be on the lookout for a man who "may or may not have one arm," which covers a lot of ground.
- Rich Bitch: Martha Lee, who is so proud of her social position and family name that she treats her daughter-in-law terribly simply because she comes from a comfortable working-class background.
- Relationship Reveal: Long after Ruth's death, Idgie confesses to her brother Julian that she and Ruth were more than best friends. Julian's not particularly surprised to learn this, only surprised that Idgie finally admitted it.
- Retcon: A few, probably due to the 33-year
Sequel Gap, although there are some indications that the extremely popular movie might have informed the sequel.- In Fried Green Tomatoes, Evelyn was an attractive, popular cheerleader with many friends in high school, who wonders what went wrong when she hit adulthood. This is retconned to her recalling that she was always a shy, chubby teen who never fit in.
- In the first novel, Evelyn is 48 in 1986 when she first meets Ninny. In the sequel, she's only 51 years old in 2010, even though she correctly notes that she met Ninny 25 years ago. Her age appears to have been changed in order to make her significantly younger than the 80+ Bud, even though by the original timeline, Evelyn would only be a few years younger than he. note
- In the first novel, Bud's adult daughter is named Norma and the family lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Here she's named Ruthie and she's never lived in Alabama; she was born in Maryland and didn't visit her father's home state until adulthood. Since it's specifically stated that Ruthie's an only child, it's not possible for "Norma" to be a sibling.
- Ruth Jamison was originally described as having "light auburn" hair. Ruthie Caldwell is said to look exactly like her, hair color included, but is also described as having dark brown hair. Likewise, in the first book, young Stump is noted to be blond, like Idgie, but the sequel states that he had dark hair now gone silver.note
- In the sequel, young Buddy receives a three-legged dog named Lady for Christmas, a gift from Idgie, who got the dog from Eva Bates. In the first book, after Buddy becomes downhearted over his missing arm, Idgie takes him to meet Eva Bates's three-legged dog Lady as a lesson in how you can still enjoy life with a lost limb, but it's the last time the dog's mentioned; there's no indication that he ever saw her again, much less that she ever belonged to him.
- In the first novel, Ninny tells Evelyn that Whistle Stop still exists as a modernized shadow of its former self, complete with a supermarket and McDonald's, long after the original townsfolk moved on. Here it appears that once the last residents left, Whistle Stop was reclaimed by the woods.
- Silver Fox: At 80+, Bud's still tall, handsome, and charming the ladies.
- Technology Marches On: In universe. Halfway through the book, Dot Weems's newspaper turns into an email bulletin.
- Memento MacGuffin: Ninny left Evelyn a box of old keepsakes, and Evelyn's determination to deliver the box to Bud kicks off the plot.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Just Martha Lee, for Ruthie; Ruthie's father-in-law was very kind of her. But Martha Lee more than makes up for it. (She doubles as My Beloved Smother for Ruthie's late husband Brooks.)
- Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Bud Threadgoode's legal first name really is Buddy, a fact that further convinced Martha Lee that her son's married into a family of rednecks. He's named after Idgie's beloved brother Buddy…except that in that case, Buddy was a nickname (his real name, as revealed on his gravestone, was James Lee Threadgoode) so Bud is technically named after a nickname.
