Bonus Review: The Biscuit Witch

The Biscuit Witch

A Crossroads Café novella, 
Book One of The MacBrides
By Deborah Smith

Publisher: 

Belle Bridge Books

Release Date: April 30, 2013

Tallulah Bankhead MacBride is on the run. Her daughter’s father, a New York celebrity chef, is determined to stop the rumors that he has never even seen his five-year-old daughter. Tal is equally determined to protect her child from the man who is “equal parts Bully, Braggart, and All-around Self-Centered jerk.” When an altercation involving cupcakes ends in a warrant for Tal’s arrest, she and her daughter take to the road. Tal needs a sanctuary, and since her sister in California is too far away, she heads toward the place she once called home, the mountains of North Carolina, northwest of Ashville, where her cousin Delta Whittlespoon owns the Crossroads Café.

Delta is away in New York, but the eccentric population of the community proves more than a match for the hired guns the jerky chef has sent after Tal. It turns out that the Crossroads Café needs Tal as much as she needs a safe place to hide. The biscuits Delta shipped from New York have been routed wrongly, and hungry hordes of tourists are scheduled to arrive expecting to be served the world-famous biscuits. Nobody can bake biscuits to match Delta’s--nobody except Tal who, like Delta herself, is a hereditary biscuit witch who can make biscuits by the secret recipe of their common ancestress, Mary Eve Nettie, the wild woman of Wild Woman Ridge. Perhaps Tal can find a place to belong.

The staunchest defender of Tal and her daughter Eve is another beneficiary of Delta’s benevolence and willingness to extend cousinhood to the most remote family connections. Douglas Firth, a whistle-blowing veterinarian from Scotland via Florida, is the third cousin twice removed of Delta’s husband, Sheriff Pike Whittlespoon. That connection is all Delta needs to offer Douglas a place to call home and a job as vet when he is cast out of wealthy racing circles. It takes scarcely more than a second look for the red-haired biscuit whisperer and five-year-old Eve to own the heart of this Scotsman. He opens his home and the ghost town where it is located to Tal and Eve. But Douglas and Tal have stories to share, secrets to unravel, and enemies to defeat before Tal can believe in a future that includes home, family, and a love bigger than her hungry dreams.

“The Biscuit Witch” is the first of a new, three-part novel from Deborah Smith, her first since A Gentle Rain (2007). Smith takes her readers back to the world of A Crossroads Café (2006), a place where the eccentric is ordinary and where outcasts, misfits, and other assorted lost souls find healing, wholeness, and home. The point of view alternates between Tal and Douglas, a technique that expands the reader’s experience.

I loved everything about “The Biscuit Witch”—its quirky characters, its humor of word and situation, the spirit of the large-hearted Delta that saturates the scenes even in her absence, a sense of place so strong that I felt the late November chill and smelled the baking biscuits, and the lyrical prose that touched my heart like an old song from a half-remembered dream. The touch of magical realism was an added delight. According to Flannery O’Connor, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.” Deborah Smith has found that crossroads, and she takes her reader there.

When I’m 103 and rocking on the porch of the local nursing home with the latest reading device filled with favorite romance novels and promising new ones in hand, I’ll still be wondering why Deborah Smith’s books aren’t on the bookshelves, print or digital, of every romance reader. Her characters, imperfect and past-haunted, are gloriously real and infinitely interesting. That description applies not only to Tal and Douglas but also to an impressive cast of secondary characters, including Tal’s sister, Gabby (Greta Garbo MacBride), the pickle queen, and her brother, Gus (Groucho Marx MacBride), the kitchen charmer, whose stories will be told in parts two and three. 

If you’ve never read Deborah Smith, “The Biscuit Witch” is a terrific introduction. The Crossroads Café, the novel in which Delta Whittlespoon first appears, is also a powerful and richly emotional tale. The digital version is on sale for $1.99 through the end of this month. I highly recommend both. And if you want more recommendations, A Place to Call Home is one of my all-time top ten favorite romances, and A Gentle Rain, Charming Grace, Sweet Hush, When Venus Fell, and On Bear Mountain all get five-star ratings from me.

Are there writers you love who deserve a much larger audience than the one they have? Who? 

Tuesday Review: The River Witch

The River Witch

By Kimberly Brock

Publisher: Bell Bridge Books

Release Date: April 6, 2012

I don’t read a lot of debut authors. Their absence from my annual list of books read has nothing to do with prejudice against beginning authors and everything to do with the number of authors who are autobuys for me and the limited number of books I am able to read. The debut authors I do read tend to be friends or friends of friends. Less frequently, I will read a debut author who comes highly recommended by someone whose opinion about books I respect.  Most of these books are romance fiction. Recently I read a rare debut book that falls in none of these categories. It is a Southern novel that seduced me with its cover copy, and it gets two thumbs up from me and a notation in my reading journal to keep an eye out for the next book from this author.

Thirty-year-old Roslyn Byrne is facing a season of loss. First, a short-term affair with a man who “wasn’t a bad man, but . . . was a plain bad choice” ends with his going home to his wife. A short time later, Roslyn suffers injuries in an automobile accident that end her career with the Atlanta Ballet Company. While she is in the hospital recovering, her maternal grandmother, an influential figure in her childhood, dies. Several months later, she loses a baby and her sane, cynical hold on reality. Her mother, fearful that Roslyn will retreat to the Byrne home place in Glenmary, Tennessee, persuades her to travel to Manny’s Island, an isolated spot in the marshlands off the eastern coast of St. Simon’s, one of Georgia’s Golden Isles. Broken and scarred in body and spirit, Roslyn will find in this mystical, unfamiliar place the healing she needs to integrate all the parts of who she is and become healthy and whole.

The house Roslyn rents and the twelve acres on which it stands belong to Urey Trezevant. Over the months Roslyn spends on the island, she forms connections with the mysterious Urey and his young daughter Damascus, named for the river that borders their property. Like Roslyn, they are people who have known a loss so grievous that they remain among the walking wounded. Urey’s sister, Ivy Trezevant Cain, who is hungry for a life larger than the one she has on the island, becomes Roslyn’s friend, as does her teenage son, a charmer known as JB. Ivy’s husband, Will, provides a way for Roslyn to share a part of her Byrne legacy. Each of them, along with Nonnie, the old conjure woman who has a vision concerning Roslyn purpose on Manny’s Island, and Otis, the stubborn old farmer who knows checkers and pumpkin husbandry, has something to teach Roslyn.

From Roslyn and Damascus, the point of view characters, to the minor characters, even those who people the book only as memories, Brock creates a cast of crazy-quilt personalities of shifting colors, contradictory impulses, and secrets hidden sometimes even from those who possess them. They challenge the mind and touch the heart. I found Damascus, part lost child and part old soul, particularly appealing. She reminded me of other girl children in cherished Southern novels, characters like Carson McCullers’s Frankie and Harper Lee’s Scout.

Brock proves in this lovely, lyrical novel filled with music, natural and perhaps supernatural, that the conventions of southern literature can still be used with grace, power, and freshness by a twenty-first century Southern writer. The past is a vital force that impinges on the present, place as presented in the present of Manny’s Island and the mythic time of Glenmary is as rich and vibrant a presence as any character, family ties that can sustain and imprison—these qualities and more place Brock in the tradition of Southern literature. Hers is an exceptional debut. The River Witch is a beautiful book, haunting and unforgettable. I rank it with the best of contemporary Southern fiction.

I reiterate for my friends who read only romance fiction, be advised that this is not a romance. I highly recommend The River Witch, but it does not have a conventional HEA, although the ending is neither depressing nor confusing.

What’s the last book by a debut author that made you want to share its wonder with all your reading friends?