If you’ve ever known or been part of, a wild, wacky, loveable, dysfunctional Southern family, you’ll likely recognize some, if not all, of the characters in this lively novel.

Caroline Wimbley Levine, protagonist and narrator of the book is the rebellious daughter who fled her Low Country plantation home in South Carolina for college in New York City. She finds love, marriage and a career in the big city and intends never to return to live in South Carolina. But when her brother, Tripp, an alcoholic lawyer married to a trashy woman the Wimbleys detest, calls to say that their mother has gone off her rocker, Caroline considers a visit.

Shortly after, something occurs between she and her husband and she decides to pack up herself and her son and head for the Low Country for a time, as yet undetermined.

But it turns out that her mother, Miss Lavinia, the “Queen of Tall Pines” is far from crazy. Eccentric and imperious, the 60 year old widow has had some affairs…. Bizarre ones, in the sometimes stuffy eyes of Tripp, but hardly cause for having her committed, as he has been persuaded by his avaricious wife, to try to do.

As Miss Lavinia puts it, she is exercising her Constitutional rights to “the pursuit of happiness.”

Meanwhile, Caroline has time to re-examine herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her mother.

The book is smoothly written and fast-paced. Its portrait of the Low Country and of plantation life, then and now, evokes a sense in the reader of truly being there, savoring the sounds and scents, the beauty of this unique landscape of flora, fauna and most of all, the vivid characters created, at least in part, by the setting in which they dwell.

Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons, Harper Collins

“I met Lewis Aiken when I was thirty-five and resigned to the fact that I would not marry for love, only, perhaps, for convenience, and he was fifty and had long been married, until fairly recently, for no reason other than love.” So begins the latest novel by Anne Rivers Siddons.

The love affair of Anny Butler, the protagonist and narrator of this story, and Lewis Aiken, who marry shortly after their first meeting, is among the most powerful and subtly told love stories I have ever read, and yet, their story is but an undercurrent to the tale of the four couples whose lives entwine and enmesh until they are a “family” so close that every act and every incident of each reverberates through all of the eight.

The offshore island beach houses, on Edisto and Sullivan Islands, in which they live much of their time through many years, become major characters in the book, as does the Low Country, from the elegant drawing rooms of upper crust Charleston, to the traditional Gullah communities and the redneck haunts of outlying towns.

The big, rambling gray-shingle house on Sullivan Island is where Anny Butler meets the three couples who, with Aiken, jointly own the place and who have been Lewis Aiken’s closest friends for all his life. Immediately, they draw her into their close, loving, almost idyllic “family,” and for the first time in her life, Anny has found a home, a family, and the closeness and warmth she has lacked throughout her life. All four couples have other homes in other places, but it is in the Sullivan Island hideaway they find the greatest peace and happiness. Then tragedy strikes the little group. As they draw ever closer together, a sense of foreboding grows.

Years pass in a kaleidoscope of passion and hard work, trips for fun and trips for humanitarian causes, which are often more fun and sometimes exuberantly funny, as in a wonderful story of when Anny ends up spending a week or more in a bordello in a tiny village in Guatemala.

Siddons is a master at building tension and suspense, and it grows steadily through hurricanes and deaths and tragedies. The little surrogate family heals and nurtures after every blow.

As the story crescendos toward its inexorable, shocking climax, the family holds on. And then the climax comes. When it does, it strikes with a resounding inevitability that leaves the reader saying, of course, I should have known, I should have guessed.

If this novel has a flaw, it is that after this dramatic denouement, another chapter follows, wrapping up loose ends and offering a glimpse of a new beginning. Readers will likely be equally divided in their opinions about this, but nothing can detract from the reality that Siddons has written yet another compelling, fascinating story. --- CS

Savannah Blues by Mary Kay Andrews, Perennial, March 2003

In Savannah Blues, spunky, saucy, and cheeky Eloise “Weezie” Foley, a Savannah antique picker, careens through an intriguing maze of back alley yard and estate sales, the Machiavellian maneuverings of local antique dealers, famed, infamous and obscure, and a murder that is nearly pinned on her.

Betrayed by her aristocratic, Savannah-blue-blood husband’s affair with the malevolent Caroline De Santos, Weezie has kicked the cad out of the fine historic home she so carefully restored. Now, backed by his old-line family lawyers, hubby Talmadge Evans III, has gained the house in the divorce settlement, and relegated Weezie to living behind the place in the old carriage house, while he and Caroline, now engaged, play nasty games in front.

Weezie is supported by her motley mut, Jethro, as endearing a canine character as I’ve met in a while, and an assortment of quirky characters, including an alcoholic mother and an uncle, a priest turned lawyer now carrying on a clandestine affair with another man, and a quirky assortment of others who could only live in the South, if not Savannah in particular.

The author, Mary Kay Andrews, covered the trial of Jim Williams made famous in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and demonstrates her investigative skills beautifully in her meticulous portrait of the world of antiques and a healthy glimpse of Savannah’s low life and high life. She clearly follows the old adage of story telling, to get your character up a tree and then start throwing rocks at her. The rocks abound, and grow larger by the day, and the tree of the story sprouts thorns. Despite this, the plot seems thin and the suspense murky.

Weezie carries the day, though, by her memorably engaging zaniness and the delightful appeal of her coherts. All in all, Savannah Blues is a good read. --- CS

The Clearing delves deep into the often mysterious world of the rural South in the early part of the 20th Century. This dark world of violence and poverty serves as backdrop to the story of the devastation of a man and his entire family by the horrors of war, in this case, World War I.

Prior to the war, Byron Aldridge was the heir to a wealthy Pennsylvania timber family. To his younger brother, Randolph, he was hero, mentor and idol. But when this hero returns from the war, he is emotionally wasted, and his festering mental deterioration sends him wandering off from his home to drift from job to job as a lawman, from place to place, finally disappearing altogether.

His heartbroken father sets up a search for him and eventually he is located in a remote and violent Louisiana mill town, which the father promptly buys. He then sends Randolph out to run the place and to try and persuade Byron to come home.

The mill and the town are unlike anything Randolph has ever seen or dreamed. It is a place where men are surrounded by cypress swamps and menace, leading lives of ceaseless, backbreaking toil punctuated only by the brutal entertainments provided by the mobsters who control the whiskey and gambling and prostitutes, and by the rough justice meted out by the tormented and half-mad Byron. Randolph struggles to understand him; to regain his trust. Their wives struggle with hope and disappointments. The future grows bleaker and more fearsome.

In the end, it is a story about family and about the human condition and its resilience. Gautreaux characters are vivid and palpably believable. No one who reads this book will want to put it down until they reach the dramatic and surprising climax. --- CS

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The lyrical imagery of time and place has long been the strength of Southern writers whose skill at symbolism so enhances character and plot. Donna Tartt is a master. The opening chapter of The Little Friend will hold you riveted, and you'll not let go until you've reached the dramatic end of this incredible story.

On a basic level, the book is a murder-mystery-suspense novel that builds tension in unparalleled ways before its final, climactic conclusion .It is a coming of age story like none other, and a classic tale of good and evil. Set in the Seventies, as the South was barely emerging from generations of violent racial segregation and the only slightly more subtle segregation of Class, this portrait rivals the work of Faulkner.

When protagonist Harriet Dufresnes was an infant, her nine year old, now legendary, brother, Robin, was brutally murdered. The crime has never been solved. As the story opens, Harriet, now age 12, determines to hunt down and avenge her brother's killer and to penetrate the myriad mysteries that swirl like storm clouds throughout the history of her family, the town and her neighbors' families.

Robin has grown to legendary status in the town. In one church, his portrait is featured in a picture of Jesus talking to little children. In Harriet's mind, and in the family mythology, he towers as a pinnacle of perfection toward which no one, not even the feisty Harriet, dares to aspire. It is his loss, and the mystery and meaning of loss itself that Harriet seeks to penetrate and revenge.

Smart and spunky, independent and vastly well read, Harriet is the antithesis of what her family expects of a proper, preadolescent, budding Southern belle. She is as vivid a character as any in literature; as bright as a blazing Southern summer sun at high noon. And soon, she fixes on her "suspect," a young man from a "trailer trash" community not far away. The portraits of these people are every bit as insightful and penetrating as those of her own dysfunctional, struggling-to-remain upper-middle class clan.

As the mystery unfolds, so do the lives and the fantasies of her family, a matriarchy largely headed by Harriet's eccentric grandmother and the fiercely proud yet cowed maid, Ida, each in their own unique way intent upon re-inventing the family history.

The Little Friend is one of those books that will make you regret coming to the end of it, until you realize that Harriet, her family, her friends and even her enemies, will remain with you for all your days. --- CS

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable remains one of those memorable characters who continue their lives in the minds of their readers for decades. Headstrong, emotionally fragile, exuberant, independent and insecure, this protagonist remains in conflict with her family and her society for a lifetime. The story, of her and her cousin, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, and Sara, the girl who loves Shep, is also the story of the South, of the enormous upheavals of the mid part of the 20th Century, of the events that have shaped the South. A must read for anyone new to this part of the country.

The House Next Door, Outer Banks, Nora Nora, Downtown, also by Anne Rivers Siddons also offer vivid portraits of the turmoil and beauty, drama and pathos of the Old turning New South.

Beach Music by Pat Conroy

This author's books, one and all, are a tribute to the continuing power of Southern novelists. In the tradition of William Faulkner, and so many others, he writes with a depth of vision and wonder about his world that few contemporary writer can equal. This novel is the story of Jack McCall, who roams from South Carolina to Rome and peruses the collective unconscious memories of Vietnam and the Jewish Holocaust to find the answer to what shaped his life in the South, and perhaps to answer the question of his wife's suicide. This book is quite simply brilliant.

Also must reads by Conroy: The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides