A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Seven--A Midnight Clear

A Midnight Clear

By Lynn Kerstan

Publisher: Belle Bridge Books

Release Date: March 11, 2013

(Reissue of 1997 Fawcett Regency)

Jane Ryder is desperate when she applies for and obtains a position as secretary to Lady Eudora Swan, an immensely wealthy grande dame, thanks to her having outlived six husbands. At eighty-six, Lady Swan is determined to leave something behind to ensure that she will be remembered. With this goal in mind, she is writing two books. One is a history of the British aristocracy to be printed a hundred years after Lady Swan’s death; the other, entitled Scandalbroth, is an account of the scandals that have rocked the ton during Lady Swan’s long memory, with three chapters devoted to the particularly disreputable Marquesses of Fallon.

The current Marquess of Fallon, recently returned from India where he made his fortune, is determined to restore the family’s estate which has been ruined by his father’s and grandfather’s excesses and the family name. Scandalbroth will make his task immeasurably difficult, if not impossible. Too stubborn to be persuaded and too wealthy to be bribed, Lady Swann is immune to the marquess’s pleas and threats. But she sends one offer via Jane. If Fallon will allow Jane access to the Fallon family papers and tell Jane his own story for the history, Lady Swan will consider destroying Scandalbroth unpublished.

Fallon has little confidence in Lady Swan’s promise and even less that there are any Fallon family papers, but he agrees that Jane can accompany him to his family estate, Wolvercote, while he considers what must be done to restore the place. At least, Jane will be company when he makes a visit to a place to which he is strangely reluctant to return.

Wolvercote is in deplorable condition, and the memories it holds just as unpleasant as Fallon expected. What he doesn’t expect is to fall through rotted stairs and injure himself. His injuries added to a snowstorm make a return to the inn dangerous, but Fallon refuses to shelter at Wolvercote. Instead, he and Jane make their way to the nearby dower house where his grandmother lived, the one place that holds happy childhood memories.

The snowstorm challenges the ingenuity of the two to find fuel for the fireplaces and food to eat, but both Jane and Fallon enjoy the challenge. The seclusion fosters an emotional intimacy between the mismatched pair, and they share details of their pasts that they have shared with no one else. Jane’s competence and resilience hold a strong appeal for Fallon, who is also finding her more and more attractive as they get to know one another. Jane has already lost her heart. She loses it again when their makeshift Christmas dinner is interrupted by the sound of bells and they find an infant in a basket outside the stable. Fallon has a mystery to solve that will bring him pain and joy, and Jane finds a future brighter than any she could have imagined.

I love traditional Regencies, and it was a pleasure to find a delightful one that I had not read. A wealthy marquess and a secretary who is little more than a servant seem to have nothing in common, but Jane and Fallon are both lonely people forced by circumstances to depend only on themselves and to make the most of their opportunities. Watching them become real and dear to one another and watching Lady Swan’s machinations force them into a realization of just what they have found in one another is heartwarming. The Christmas setting and the infant whose tiny hands grab both their hearts make it a special story.

If you like traditional Regencies with engaging characters or if you like historical Christmas stories with a tender romance and a generous serving of seasonal sentiment, you will enjoy this story. Once again Belle Bridge has reissued an older romance that is a true treasure. I’ll be adding A Midnight Clear to my favorite Christmas romances.

Some reissues seem dated. Some are classic stories that are timeless. I place A Midnight Clear in the latter category. What makes a story timeless for you?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Six--Protector

Protector
By Nancy Northcott

Publisher: Forever Yours

Release Date: March 5, 2013

Three years ago, helicopter pilot Josh Campbell and firefighter paramedic Edie Lang turned to one another in their grief over three comrades lost in a burnover in Wyoming. When Josh’s pager interrupted their time together, he was forced to leave, promising to return. Not even the mage magic they share was enough to overcome Josh’s reservations about a woman who regularly risked her life. He did not return. But three years was not long enough to make either of them forget the passion that flared between them. Now Edie’s crew from Colorado has been rotated in to help fight a fire devastating Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, and Josh, who flies for the Southeastern Shire Collegium (cover name: the Georgia Institute of Paranormal Research), is the pilot of the medevac helicopter  taking Edie to an injured firefighter in need of rescue.

Their chance meeting might have been only an awkward experience that stirred memories neither of them was comfortable recalling, but they both fall victim to a strange illness that depletes their mage powers. They end up in the Collegium infirmary under the care of mage healer Dr. Stefan Harper, a character readers familiar with Northcott’s debut novel, Renegade, will remember. When it turns out that their illness is due to contact with an orb that drains mages’ magical powers, a weapon of ghouls and traitor mages. Edie and Josh will have to work together to battle the forces that threaten them and worlds of Mage and Mundane alike, and they also will have to battle their feelings for one another.

Neither can deny the powerful feelings they have for one another. But Edie’s plans include becoming a smokejumper, an even more dangerous job than the one she now holds, and Josh’s conviction that women should be kept safe for the good of the family unit is deeply rooted in his childhood experience. Can their love overcome the impasse?

Protector falls between Renegade and Guardian, scheduled for release on July 2, 2013. Northcott returns the reader to the fascinating world of the benevolent mages in the Southeastern Collegium headquartered in Wayfarer, Georgia, on the edges of the mysterious Okefenokee Swamp. Northcott’s worldbuilding is sufficiently detailed even in this short form to create multi-dimensional place that is fantastical enough to appeal to the imagination and sufficiently grounded in the real to make suspension of disbelief easy. Her characters are strong and richly developed, and the stakes are high enough to keep the story compelling.

While the focus on the novella is on Edie and Josh’s story, Stefan is not the only familiar character who appears in the story. Readers who liked Renegade will enjoy seeing Griffin and Val again, and Stefan, a character I found fascinating in the first book, becomes even more so in Protector. I eagerly anticipate his story in Guardian. It’s a reunion tale too, my favorite trope. If you like a mix of fantasy and romance, or even if you’re a fan of character-driven romance willing to broaden your reading experience, I recommend this series.

Are you a reader of romantic fantasy? What do you require for willing suspension of disbelief?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Five--I'll Be Seeing You

I’ll Be Seeing You

By Suzanne Hayes 

and Loretta Nyhan

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date: May 28, 2013

It is mid-January, 1943, when Gloria Whitehall, a twenty-three-year-old in Rockport, Massachusetts, pregnant with her second child, writes her first letter to her new pen-pal, Marguerite “Rita” Vincenzo, an almost forty-one-year-old wife of a biology professor turned Army medic. Glory’s husband is an army staff sergeant in basic training. Rita’s husband is already in Tunisia, and her eighteen-year-old son is in basic training with the Navy. The only thing the two women have in common is their status as military wives in a time of war. They belong to different generations, different social classes, and different geographical regions. Glory’s home in Rockport was her parents’ summer home; it is one of three homes she inherited from them. Rita and her husband Sal are first-generation Americans from Chicago, Her parents were German immigrants; his were Italian. Their lifestyle is solidly middle-class. 

Yet over the almost three and a half years that these women exchange letters in which they share their pasts and their present, their fears and their hopes, their failures and their triumphs, their friends and their families, a rare and powerful friendship develops. They become a lifeline for one another, offering through their letters honesty, acceptance, and emotional sustenance.  Their friendship makes both women braver, wiser, and more resilient. The letters allow the reader to share the forging of this extraordinary friendship and to meet through Glory and Rita’s words, and occasionally through others’ letters, the other people who fill their lives.

I’ll Be Seeing You is an extraordinary book. It brings World War II on the American home front vividly to life. The details that Glory and Rita share remind the reader of the fear and loneliness those left behind experienced, of the terror the sight of a telegram delivery struck in their hearts, and of the courage they displayed by getting on with life and doing all they could for the war effort. The recipes they share show how people coped with rationing, and reminders of the scarcity of everything from women’s stockings to children’s toys demonstrate how war affected every aspect of life.

Most of all, the novel celebrates the power of women’s friendship to strengthen, enrich, and transform the lives of women blessed to find friend of the heart and form bonds of intimacy that bridge all differences of age, class, and place.

This is an extraordinary book, made more so by the fact that the two women who wrote it did so through correspondence without ever meeting face-to-face. I love epistolary novels, and this one may be my favorite since Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies in 1993. If you like women’s fiction that touches the heart and illuminates your understanding of what it means to live with courage and compassion for others and for yourself, I highly recommend I’ll Be Seeing You.

I’m happy to see more books being written about the World War II era. What historical period would you like to see more of in fiction?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Four--Love Rehab

Love Rehab: 

A Novel in Twelve Steps

By Jo Piazza

Publisher: 

Open Road Media e-Original

Release Date: June 4, 2013

Sophie is an illustrator of children’s books, but her work is stacking up undone. Her personal hygiene and friendships are suffering, and Sophie is spending far too much time vainly checking her cell phone for calls that are never made. Unable to let go of Eric, her cheating ex-boyfriend, she cyber stalks him and the woman for whom he dumped her, Floozy McSecretary, a big-boobed, sexting blonde. When Eric finally calls, it’s with a threat to call the police after Sophie and her best friend Annie, drunk past the point of reason and discretion, create a Facebook page for Eric’s penis.

Sophie is not the only one in trouble. When her best friend Annie, owner of a local bar, “borrows” a police car and races through their hometown of Yardville, New Jersey, endangering property and feline lives, she is charged with DUI and ends up with a suspended license and court-ordered counseling and AA attendance. Sophie agrees to attend the meeting with her, although Sophie rarely drinks. Annie is silent during the meeting, bothered by the presence of bar customers and her pediatrician, but Sophie finds comfort in the confession and support of the AA group. She is struck by the similarity between her experience with Eric and the experiences of the AA members. Sophie is a love addict, and she knows other women who are also love addicts. With the encouragement of Joe, the AA leader, she starts Love Addicts Anonymous.

Thanks to Sophie’s editor putting out the word and Sophie contacting all her friends with relationship problems, thirty plus women show up for the first meeting. Among them is Prethi, who has been dumped by her doctor fiancé for a brain surgeon. Jobless, homeless, and embarrassed to tell her traditional Indian parents what has happened to her, Prethi finds refuge in the aging six-bedroom Victorian that Sophie inherited from her grandmother. Soon the house becomes a rehab facility for women in various stages of love addiction, with some members living in-house and others “‘outpatients’ who commuted in on Sundays.”

Love Rehab is light chick-lit. It is genuinely funny with some great dialogue and some scenes that will leave most readers laughing out loud. Some of the humor may come with a sting as readers recognize a comment or a situation that comes close to home. You don’t have to be under thirty-five to recognize the woman who is divorcing her cheating husband and talks incessantly about her heartbreak to everyone from her closest friends to the gas station attendant or to understand when Sophie admits, “I just wanted my boyfriends to like me so much that I never really considered whether I liked them.”

The ending is a bit too starry-eyed to be fully credible, and Joe, who has the potential to be complex and interesting, ends up being little more than a means of giving Sophie her HEA, or at least a HFN. Still, it is an entertaining read with some accurate revelations about the degree that women see themselves as defined by a man who views them as worthy—or unworthy—of his love. If you are in the mood for laughs perhaps accompanied by some insights, you should give Love Rehab a try.

Do you read chick-lit? I read an article in the Atlantic recently that said the subgenre, at least in its best known form, is dead. What do you think?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Three Once Upon a Tower

Once Upon a Tower

By Eloisa James

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: May 28, 2013

Gowan Stoughton, Duke of Kinross, Chief of Clan MacAulay, is a man who knows the value of time. He might prefer to be in the Highlands fishing for salmon to being in an English ballroom fishing for a wife, but since he needs information from the Earl of Gilchrist, it seems prudent to combine the two tasks. But Gowan is the one who is hooked at first sight by Gilchrist’s beautiful daughter. He told himself that diligence was the chief criterion for his duchess, but it is not a quality he considers at all in choosing Lady Edith Gilchrist for his bride.

Instead, from the moment he sees her, Gowan thinks of Edie in the language of fairy tales. She is “otherworldly.” She looks as if she were “dreaming of her home under a fairy hill.” Her hair “gleamed like the golden apples of the sun.” Gowan, who professes to value the utilitarian, suddenly discovers that Shakespeare has his uses since the bard gives Gowan the words to express his inexpressible feelings for the glorious Edie: “I never saw true beauty till this night.”

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 5).

The reader soon discovers that Edie’s silence and serenity, qualities that greatly appeal to Gowan, as well as her “burning touch” are attributable to her feverishness. Edie is much less ethereal and much more unconventional than Gowan knows. He doesn’t even know that music is the most important thing to her. Edie is a gifted cellist, good enough to have been a performer had she been born male. From the first letter he receives from her, Gowan learns that his first impression of Edie was an incomplete picture. It will take marriage to teach him how incomplete.

Since she was so ill when they met, Edie knows even less about Gowan than he knows about her. She’s not even certain what the man she has promised to marry looks like. Her strongest memory is of his “enchanting Scottish burr.” Combining her own vague recollection of him with what her stepmother tells her, Edie concludes that she is about to become the wife of “a Scotsman the size of a bloody tree with no sense of humor and an impulsive bent.”  

The letters Edie and Gowan exchange do reveal something of who they are, but they are still essentially strangers when they marry. They are also quite young: she is nineteen and he is twenty-one. They are also both single-minded in their obsessions, as the young are prone to be, and neither really understands what drives the other. Nor have they learned the necessity of compromise.

Gowan learns that Edie’s practice time with her cello is important to her, but he does not understand that music determines how Edie thinks, how she views the external world. He says to her at one point, “You may be a musician, but that is not the sum of you.” And Edie’s response is to think he is wrong, that music is the sum of her. It isn’t all of who she is, of course, but it does color everything about her. This is particularly true because for all of her life, music has been both her single passion and her sole means of real connection with her only parent.

Gowan is as consumed by his responsibilities as duke and chief of his clan as Edie is by her music. Edie subconsciously understands this, as one intuitive response reveals: “Hundreds of years of self-assurance had been drilled into him with the same rigor as had her musical scales.

Earlier she recognizes that Gowan is “as driven as she. . . Though she wasn’t entirely sure in what direction.” What she can’t know is that for Gowan, as for Edie, the importance of this role is magnified by what his father was.

The potential for problems is there from the beginning, and then the problems with their sex life complicate the situation even more. Edie and Gowan are not merely sexually inexperienced; they are true innocents. Edie barely understands what the word “prick” means. She doesn’t even know how to flirt. She is dependent upon what her stepmother tells her, and some of Layla’s advice is very bad indeed. Gowan was betrothed to his first fiancée when he was very young, and the licentiousness of his parents has made him adopt high standards for his own behavior. He was too honorable to be faithless, believing that lying with another woman when his troth was  pledged would dishonor both his fiancée and himself. He found the idea of paying for sex “distasteful.” Gowan knows more about sex than Edie does, but his knowledge is based on certain illustrated volumes in his library. Their ignorance combined with their inability to communicate is disastrous.

The first seventeen chapters show Gowan and Edie meeting and moving toward marriage. The next twenty-five show their marriage moving toward trouble, deeply in trouble, and achieving their HEA. Eloisa James is at her finest when she writes marriage-in trouble stories, and Once Upon a Tower is no exception.

I spent a great deal of time trying to get all the reasons I love this book into coherent paragraphs. I couldn’t do it. My enthusiasm just kept overpowering my rational thought process. So instead of reasoned criticism, I give you a list:

The Top Ten Reasons I Loved Once Upon a Tower

(in addition to Gowan and Edie, of course)

10. Literary Allusions

One of the things I always look forward to in an Eloisa James novel is the literary allusions. I have fun trying to identify those she sneaks in, but even when they come with full identification, I enjoy them. The Romeo and Juliet references were a joy in this one, but an even greater delight was the use of John Donne’s aubade, a poem I love for many reasons.

9. Smythe-Smith

What fun to have Edie and Gowan attending the wedding of Honoria Smyth-Smith to the Earl of Chatteris! I love the idea that they are all part of one world. I might say it’s “Just like Heaven.”

8. Letters

I loved the letters! I thought they were funny, and I thought they served a significant purpose  in allowing Gowan and Edie to learn a little more about one another before their second meeting.

7. Bardolph

Since Bardolph’s name comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I and Henry V, I might have included him with the literary allusions, but another of my particular joys in reading Eloisa James is decoding the names she gives tertiary characters. My favorite is Prufrock, Piers’s butler in When Beauty Tamed the Beast, but Bardolph is a close second. He’s a terrific character, much worthier than the character whose name he bears.

6. Layla

First, Layla with her cheroots, her empty flirtations, her unhappy marriage, and her loving heart is a vibrant character , one who is easy to like. But I also thought her name fit perfectly into the novel, evoking both the character from Arabic literature whose love story has some similarities to Romeo and Juliet and Eric Clapton’s song by that title (based on the literary character). I thought a couple of Clapton’s lines fit EJ’s Layla well: “You've been running and hiding much too long. / You know it's just your foolish pride.”

5. The Dress

I can’t say too much about this without moving into spoiler territory, but readers will understand the importance of The Dress, the one that makes you look the way you want to look, the one that affects him exactly the way you want it too. Edie wears such a dress. It is “China rose. . . . Darker than cinnabar, more saturated than claret . . . well, close to claret.”  It is amazing, and it leads to a Moment. The only other thing I’m going to say is that nobody can make a kiss on the hand as sexy as Eloisa James does.

 4. The Tower

Part of the fun of reading James’s fairy tale romances is considering how she uses elements of the traditional story, sometimes staying true to them in order to suggest the original and sometimes giving one a twist to make it reflect a quite different meaning. Edie is beautiful like Rapunzel. In fact Gowan’s comparison of her hair to the “golden apples of the sun” echoes the description from the Grimm Brothers’ tale (1812) that calls her “the most beautiful child under the sun.”  Rapunzel is musical as well. It is her voice that first enchants the king’s son. Edie is a cellist rather than a singer, but her playing enchants Gowan the first time he hears her. Rapunzel and her prince marry, but they must overcome obstacles before they begin their HEA. Edie and Gowan’s story follows the same pattern. The prince wanders blind, weeping over the loss of his wife. Gowan’s blindness is metaphoric, but he too wanders and weeps for the same cause.  And in both stories, the wife’s tears are healing.

The twist comes with the tower. Rapunzel is shut into a tower that “had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window.” The tower sounds similar to Edie’s, but Edie chooses to shut herself into her tower rather than being imprisoned there by an enchantress.  Readers with a Freudian leaning may see the tower as a phallic symbol. I was more interested in seeing Edie’s making choices and taking action as evidence of her maturing and recognizing her autonomy, qualities that link Edie more closely to Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force’s version of the tale, "Persinette"  (1697).

3. The Groveling

Sometimes my affection for a book is shadowed by the hero’s insufficient groveling for what I see as serious offenses. EJ’s Potent Pleasures is one of those books. But Gowan grovels beautifully. Additionally, other characters—several of them-- say to Gowan all the things I wanted to shout at him. Wonderful!

2. The Language

The language of Eloisa James’s novels is an abiding joy. There are the lovely, lyrical lines that sing softly in the reader’s ear. I pick out one sentence in every EJ novel that particularly satisfies my love of the lyrical line. My pick for OUAT: “Her lips held a natural curve, as if she had a kiss or a smile in reserve, one that she had never given away.” 

Beyond the lyricism, there is a sense of rightness in every word. James gives the reader the feeling that each word is chosen with precision and purpose. For example, in one scene Layla claims that her husband doesn’t like her. Edie says to her, “I believe you do like each other. You just need to talk more.” The language here is simple; twelve of the thirteen words in the two sentences are monosyllabic.  But the rhythm is perfect for the situation, intensifying the directness and genuineness of Edie’s response. Her words are also touched with irony since the reader understands what Edie does not: her words will apply as well to Edie and Gowan.

      1. The Totally Satisfying HEA

No matter what else I love about a romance novel, it can never reach my top tier of favorites if the ending     fails to leave me believing that the love of the H/H is the kind that can survive all the blows life will deliver. The ending of OUAT leaves me with this feeling with no reservations. The romantic gesture is perfect, the luscious frosting on the very best cake.

I highly recommend this one. Imagine I’m sending up “Read This!” balloons to remind you that it’s available in one week.

Are you a fan of fairy tale romances? What qualities do your top tier favorites have in common?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Two--Just One Kiss

Just One Kiss

By Susan Mallery

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: May 28, 2013

Justice Garrett was Patience McGraw’s first love, but he disappeared from Fool’s Gold with no warning before the young teens ever shared a kiss. Patience grew up and married at eighteen a man who couldn’t accept the responsibilities of fatherhood and left her less than a year later. She and her ten-year-old daughter Lillie live with Patience’s mother Ava, who suffers from MS. Patience is an optimist who enjoys her life in Fool’s Gold, dreaming of the day she can open Brew-haha, a coffee shop and occasionally regretting the man shortage in her hometown. One day Justice walks back into her life as unexpectedly as he walked out.

Memories of Fool’s Gold and Patience have been bright spots in the bleak early life of Justice Garrett. He has never forgotten Patience, and the adult version is even better than his memories. The grown-up Patience has the same vitality and straightforwardness that characterized her fourteen-year-old self and a new beauty that makes Justice dangerously aware of her. He’s hoping that his move back to Fool’s Gold will give him something he’s never had—a normal life, but he is convinced that his past makes him unfit for Patience. Life with his career criminal father, the witness protection program to prevent the father he had testified against from killing him, and a career as a military sniper have immersed his very soul in darkness that he doesn’t want touching the sweetness of Patience and her family. Can he build the security training facility that he and his friends Ford Hendrix and Angel Whittaker are planning for Fool’s Gold and keep his relationship with Patience one of friendship when he wants so much more?

Justice’s effect on Patience is just as potent as it was in the past, but Patience is more wary now. Abandoned by both her father and her husband, she knows men are always leaving. Even Justice left her, and however good his reason, he has made no effort to get in touch with her during the intervening years, not even when he reconnected with Ford, their mutual friend. Patience has to protect not only her own heart but also that of her vulnerable daughter who clearly is not immune to Justice’s charm. But Patience thinks Justice owes her the kiss she never got all those years ago, and as both she and Justice are about to discover just one kiss will never be enough.

Just One Kiss is Susan Mallery’s sixteenth trip to Fool’s Gold, California (eleven novels and five novellas), so perhaps it is not surprising that the basic plot in this one—hero driven by demons from his past too noble to commit to the heroine, whose roots run deep in the small town and who has her own reasons for wariness—is a familiar one. But Mallery’s characters are so appealing that plot similarities are a minor quibble. Patience is a delight—warm, funny, loyal, and resolute, and Justice, whose blond, blue-eyed good looks are the antithesis of his inner darkness, is not only a hunk but also a man of courage and decency, capable of more tenderness and love than he realizes.

The secondary characters, especially Lillie and Ava, add depth and interest to the story. As always, part of the fun of reading a Fool’s Gold book is the appearance of various members of the community, those whose HEAs are in process and those whose stories are yet to come. If you are a regular visitor to Fool’s Gold, you will want to be certain to buy your ticket for this year’s trips. (You can purchase them in advance.) If you’ve never been to Fool’s Gold, I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy small towns with a distinctive history and dozens of fascinating people. I never miss an opportunity to visit.

One of the things I especially enjoy about Fool’s Gold and other favorite fictional small towns is the presence of all ages from infants to nonagenerians, but it does make for a large cast of characters. Do you like books with dozens of characters, or do you belong to the camp that believes the focus in romance fiction belongs solidly on the H/H?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day One--The Sassy Belles

The Sassy Belle

By Beth Albright

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date: May 28, 2013

Blake O’Hara Heart and Vivi McFadden are BFFs, and have been since they were nine-year-olds in a Catholic school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so who else would Vivi turn to when Lewis Heart, Vivi’s latest lover and the Voice of the Crimson Tide, stops breathing during an intimate encounter at the Fountain Mist Motel. Both Blake and her husband Harry, brother to the breathless Lewis, are attorneys. Vivi is going to need two attorneys because by the time the police get to the Fountain Mist, the body has disappeared.

Things get more complicated by the minute when the homicide investigator in charge of the case turns out to be Sonny Bartholomew, Blake’s old boyfriend. The murder case may have turned into a missing person case, but Vivi is still a person of interest. Blake and Harry spend the tenth anniversary of a marriage that may be in its death throes in the bar of the historic Tutwiler Hotel, the scene of Harry ‘s proposal, listening to the man Blake might have married ask her best friend questions about  Vivi’s sex life with the missing brother  to whom Harry hasn’t spoken in six years. This may be a scandal big enough to torpedo Harry’s chances of becoming the next senator from Alabama. 

The case seems to be stirring up more questions than answers, and half of Tuscaloosa, including Blake’s former stepsister and forever bête noire, seems to be bent on inserting themselves into the mystery. Meanwhile, Blake’s personal life is also growing more complicated as the distance between her and increases and her feelings for Sonny grow more intense. Some things are broken beyond repair, some things are fixed, and answers come from unexpected sources, but through it all three generations of Sassy Belles, “Southern Belles with attitude and a splash of fun,” emerge triumphant.

Beth Albright’s debut novel blends elements of romance, mystery, and chick lit into a frothy mix that is as Southern as grits and barbecue and as appealing as a glass of cold sweet tea on an August afternoon. Albright overgeneralizes Southern experience, but the result is a cast of amusing characters.  The Sassy Belles was such fun to read that even a reader with ties to Georgia and Auburn could enjoy a few hours in Tide Country.

The setting for this book is a real place, clearly one that the author knows well. Do you prefer your settings real or fictional?