If You Like Anne Rivers Siddons
updated 4/09
Hissy Fit by Mary Kay Andrews
Keeley Murdock's wedding to A. J. Jernigan should have been the social event of the season. But when she catches her fiance doing the deed with her maid of honor at the rehearsal dinner, all bets are off. And so is the wedding. Even worse is the financial pressure A.J.'s banking family brings to bear on Keeley's interior design business. But riding to the rescue is the redheaded stranger who's purchased a failing local bra plant, who hires Keeley to redo the derelict antebellum mansion he's bought. Her assignment: decorate it for the woman of his dreams -- a woman he's never met. Only a designing woman like Keeley Murdock can find a way to clear her name and give her cheating varmint of an ex-fiance the comeuppance he so richly deserves. And only Mary Kay Andrews can deliver such delicious social satire.
Bed and Breakfast by Lois Battle
In this Southern story of female relationships and family dysfunction, a vision of mortality provokes a widowed mother to reunite her three adult daughters. A decade of misunderstandings, ill will, and blame has kept the Taternalls apart. Bed & Breakfast recounts the story of the family coming back together over Christmas. The characters are well crafted and believable; readers are likely to recognize some personalities from the Taternall clan among their own friends and family.
Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown
At thirty-five, Mary Frazier Armstrong, called "Frazier" by friends and enemies alike, is a sophisticated woman with a thriving art gallery, a healthy bank balance, and an enviable social position. In fact, she has everything to live for, but she's lying in a hospital bed with a morphine drip in her arm and a life expectancy measured in hours. "Don't die a stranger," her assistant says on her last hospital visit. "Tell the people you love who you are." And so, as her last act on earth, Frazier writes letters to her closest family and friends, telling them exactly what she thinks of them and, since she will be dead by the time they receive the letters, the truth about herself: she's gay.
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
If the preacher's wife's petticoat showed, the ladies would make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things took a scandalous turn. That was the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, eloped with Miss Love Simpson -- a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee! On that day, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy's adventures began and an unimpeachably pious, deliciously irreverent town came to life. Not since To Kill A Mockingbird has a novel so deftly captured the subtle crosscurrents of small-town Southern life.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
In part, this is the story of two women in the 1980s: gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode tells her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women—of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Woebegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present—for Evelyn and for us—will never quite be the same.
Sullivan's Island by Dorothea Benton Frank
Born and raised on idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass. But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past, to the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms--to the only place she can truly call home.
Sarah Conley by Ellen Gilchrist
A New York City magazine editor and novelist returns home to the South when her closest childhood friend falls ill--and finds herself forced to choose between pursuing her career and rekindling her relationship with the man she has long considered the love of her life.
Same Sweet Girls by Cassandra King
This spirited group of Southern women have been holding biannual reunions ever since they were together in college, and are nothing short of compelling. There's Julia Stovall, the First Lady of Alabama, who, despite her public veneer, is a down-to-earth gal who only wants to know who her husband is sneaking out with late at night. There's Lanier Sanders, whose husband won custody of their children after he found out about her fling with a colleague. Then there's Astor Deveaux, a former Broadway showgirl who simply can't keep her flirtations in check. And Corinne Cooper, whose incredible story comes to light as the novel unfolds.
Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle
Virginia Suzanne Ballard is going home to Saxapaw, North Carolina, to sort things out--and to have the people she loves best help her through a difficult pregnancy. The reunion is bittersweet. For as three generations of marvelous women tend to Virginia, long-held secrets are revealed, half-hidden truths confessed, and precious wisdom gained--of letting go and moving on. . . .
The Last Girls by Lee Smith
Thirty-five years before, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn in class, four women floated down the same river on a manmade raft; now they are gathered at the request of their recently deceased ringleader's husband. The story unfolds through the eyes of each woman as the old friends weave college memories with their own dramas spanning the three decades since graduation.
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
The Ya-Yas are the wild circle of girls who swirl around Siddalee's mother, Vivi, whose vivid voice is "part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah." The Ya-Yas broke the no-booze rule at the cotillion, skinny-dipped their way to jail in the town water tower, disrupted the Shirley Temple look-alike contest, and bonded for life because, as one says, "It's so much fun being a bad girl!" Siddalee must repair her busted relationship with Vivi by reading a half-century's worth of letters and clippings contained in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood's packet of "Divine Secrets."
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital from Mount Salus, Mississippi, complaining of a "disturbance" in his vision. To his daughter, Laurel, it's as rare for him to admit "self-concern" as it is for him to be sick, and she immediately flies down from Chicago to be by his side. The subsequent operation on the judge's eye goes well, but the recovery does not. He lies still with both eyes heavily bandaged, growing ever more passive until finally--with some help from the shockingly vulgar Fay, his wife of two years--he simply dies. Together Fay and Laurel travel to Mount Salus to bury him, and the novel begins the inward spiral that leads Laurel to the moment when "all she had found had found her," when the "deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself" and begins to flow again.