Happy Saturday, My Lovelies! Today I have a real treat for you: an excerpt from the novel Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton. I'm excited about this one because I enjoy Southern fiction.
Below is a synopsis...
The heart has a home when it has an ally.
If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, eighteen months her senior, becomes Millie's guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie's tenth birthday.
Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother's upbringing and vastly different from anything they've ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn't gold. Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley's world as they find their way to belonging. But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?
...and this is the excerpt:
At the end of the summer of 1970, when my mother reconciled herself to the idea of divorcing my father, she needed to devise a long-range plan.
She wanted to keep up appearances, my father had lost all our money, which left her with four years until she could access the money her father left her in trust. After uncharacteristically humbling herself for financial assistance from my father’s wealthy relatives, she packed Finley and me in the car and drove with steel determination to Memphis.
She’d left my father standing drunk and hopeless in the driveway, watching his family evaporate in the distance, wondering how his life had come to this. Her mother, senile and incapacitated in Memphis’ Rosewood Nursing Home, barely clung to life. Although the house at 79 Kensington Park was in Gaga’s name, my mother had power of attorney.
So, first things first, my mother moved her mother from Rosewood to the guest house in Kensington Park and solicited the services of one Rosa Mae Jones to tend to her needs. After moving all of us into the big house, Mom set about the business of doing the two most important things: invigorating her social standing in Memphis and finding an escort, preferably a rich one looking for marriage. She set those wheels in motion after she tackled the problem of where to send Finley and me to school. According to the dictum of Memphis society, there was only one acceptable answer to the question of where to educate a girl—the private Miss Hutchison School for Girls, and it had been
that way since 1902.
My mother told me she’d made no leeway from calling the school’s administrator, so without
skipping a beat, she slid on her stockings, zipped up her Lilly Pulitzer dress, stepped into her
Pappagallo shoes, and—because a lady never steps a toe in public without it—smoothed on her pale-pink lipstick, and drove to East Memphis, where Hutchison sat regal and tree-lined, overlooking a serene lake.
She marched the two of us unannounced and entitled into the ground-floor office of the school’s headmistress, and seated herself cross-legged upon an upholstered chair while I found a seat on a chintz-covered sofa and wondered what to do with my hands.
Are you intrigued? Would you like to read more? Below is a list of the stops for this excerpt tour.
Thanks to the Book Marketing Expert for letting me be a part of the tour!
Until next time...
Happy reading!
Ricki Jill
Well, I'm intrigued!
ReplyDeleteYou sold me RJ, I love it already and I really enjoy well written southern fiction. Thanks for the review. Hope you and your family enjoy a wonderful weekend and Fourth.........hugs.
ReplyDeleteYes, I too am intrigued! Thanks Ricki Jill, and Happy 4th to you and your family!
ReplyDeleteJenna
Yep- gotta go find a copy of this!!!! Thanks, xo Diana
ReplyDelete