outhern Belle. The words conjure up thoughts of genteel, tea-sipping ladies or feisty harridans the likes of Scarlett O’Hara. But these days, Southern women are a rich combination of both sets of characteristics, and they are depicted with insight in Lois Battle’s new book, The Florabama Ladies’ Auxiliary ∧ Sewing Circle. Atlanta socialite Bonnie Duke Cullman has come to a life-altering crossroads in her life. Her husband has run out on her for a younger woman. To add insult to injury, he has also spent their life savings and filed for bankruptcy. Accustomed to a country club existence, she has never done a real day’s work in her life. So, for the first time in her life, 50-year-old Bonnie is financially strapped and facing life alone.

Hope for Bonnie comes in the form of a position at a tiny community college in Florabama, Alabama. The Cherished Lady lingerie factory is being closed down, and the college hires Bonnie to run its program for displaced homemakers and workers. In a blind-leading-the-blind proposition, Bonnie is supposed to help the factory workers, many of whom have never known another job, figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. She starts out by gathering them into a weekly group session to help everyone air their opinions and concerns, and begins to learn just how hard life is for these women.

Determined to help the ladies better their lives, Bonnie calls upon friends from her former life to help set up a cottage industry using their skills as seamstresses to design a line of unique children’s clothes. The project is a huge success, but teeters on the brink of disaster when one of their own runs off with the first big check. But with resolve that surprises even the most skeptical in the group, the women regroup and come back to prove they are capable of overcoming the odds.

Lois Battle, a South Carolina writer with seven previous novels to her credit, has gathered a delightful group of women in this heartwarming tale. There’s patient, saintly Ruth, who has always wanted to be a teacher; the hot-tempered, slightly bigoted Hilly who finds the second love of her life in a Mexican restaurant; and Roxy, the irresponsible young mother who takes any job she can get, as long as it doesn’t involve work. But the star of the story is Bonnie, who proves to herself that she is capable of overcoming her own obstacles to find a happier life and, in doing so, develops a healthy respect for herself. She even finds a little love along the way.

The Florabama Ladies’ Auxiliary ∧ Sewing Circle provides a genuine glimpse into the lives of modern-day Southern women. Don’t be surprised to find there is a little tea-sipping (and a little Scarlett) in each of these resilient ladies.

Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.

The first novel by popular essayist Bailey White, Quite a Year for Plums offers an intimate, gossipy, and occasionally irreverent glimpse into the friendship of a group of eccentrics in a small town in southern Georgia. Like a script, the book begins with a List of Characters, which is helpful for the first few chapters, as White tosses characters around as though you’ve known them all your life: There’s Roger, the plant pathologist “specializing in foliar diseases of peanut”; Ethel, Roger’s flirtatious ex-wife; Ethel’s aunt, Eula, and her post-middle-age friends who share a motherly adoration for Roger; and a dozen quirky others who appear from time to time. As in White’s acclaimed essay collections, Mama Makes up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, she demonstrates here that the lives of small-town dwellers are easily as intriguing as those of their big-city counterparts if you take the time to look, and, clearly, White’s years of observation are the secret behind her capable prose.

More than a novel, Quite a Year for Plums is a series of intertwining short stories, each chapter strong enough to stand alone. For instance, chapters about Della (“a wildlife artist visiting the area to study and paint local birds”) an outsider, by the standards of this close-knit group, who upsets the status quo by unwittingly seducing the beloved Roger are true gems. In “A Nice Day,” Roger falls in love with a woman he’s never seen based on, of all things, the items she discards at the dump: “A white plastic fan, a ceramic container of wooden spoons . . . she left notes on some items . . . Roger’s favorite, taped to a Hamilton Beach fourteen-speed blender: `Works good.’ ” When the woman, Della, finally appears, we learn why she frequents the dump: To her own consternation, she’s become frustrated by a difficult portrait of Dominique chickens, and she discards things as a means of therapy. (” . . . when she began the feathers, a week of dizzying black and white, requiring such a light touch, delicate but not tentative, she threw out all of her kitchen utensils and most of her furniture.”) White’s characters in Quite a Year for Plums are sophisticated students of horticulture and agriculture. To that end, there are priceless collisions between ruralists and weekend wannabes. When Eula’s sister, Louise, who lives next door, becomes increasingly preoccupied with hopes of attracting aliens through secret numerical codes, she’s thought to be too crazy to live alone, so Eula moves Louise in with her and arranges to have Louise’s home rented out for the spring. In “Impassioned Typographer” and “Impassioned Typographer II,” a couple from Kansas rent the home for an extended country vacation, but what begins as a romantic getaway ends in divorce as the husband reveals his passion for piecing together letters and numbers from discarded road signs. Louise finds kinship with him and moves happily back into her own home with him, begging the question, what is crazy, if it all works out? Fans of White’s earlier books will like A Good Year for Plums even more, and hope for more fiction from her in the future.

Reviewed by Rosalind S. Fournier.

For three American women, a brief, summer vacation in London becomes an unexpected journey of self-awareness for which there is no return ticket. Lesley, Margo, and Julia are childhood friends from a small Missouri town who seem to have little in common. Despite very different backgrounds and temperaments, they form bonds that withstand coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s, college, marriage, kids, divorce, geography, time, and mutual neglect. Neglect is inevitable when three people inhabit their own worlds whose orbits, without assistance, do not overlap. Julia is an art historian cum interior designer in Manhattan, Margo is a workaholic school teacher in Chicago, and Lesley is a polished society matron in St. Louis. Lesley is the force that keeps the trio from becoming a mere memory: Her tireless and self-consciously unobtrusive efforts maintain the status quo. None of the threesome exactly wears herself out with self-analysis, but readers are given enough objective details and realistically random inner thoughts to do it for them. What these women need is a vacation . . . from their routine, from their work, from their families, and from themselves. The opportunity presents itself after a bizarre act of violence in Margo’s classroom gives Lesley an excuse to consolidate forces and flee. Julia agrees to go if she can call it a business trip and keep the sightseeing and smothering camaraderie to a minimum, and Margo agrees to go if her surly, teenage daughter can come, too. London’s most prestigious bed and breakfast awaits, promising to be the ideal base from which to start anew. No one, including the worldly-wise guest house proprietor, remotely guesses how literally this idea will be realized.

The proprietor is one Mrs. Smith-Porter elegant, understated, and solitary. Unlike her three guests, she seems well-acquainted with her own motivations and is given, in her more advanced stage of life, to reflect upon her experiences with unsentimental insight. Rebirth is a notion she is intimately familiar with, having twice recreated her own image after finding her former ones less than satisfactory. Tantalizing descriptions of sightseeing tours and fancy teas ensue, expected pleasantries that are soon interrupted by the unexpected: the disappearance of one of the travelers, the appearance of an ex-husband with a shocking companion, the initiation of Julia into the shady, yet romantic world of stolen antiques, the mishap that temporarily deprives London’s best B&andB of its mistress to name a few.

The outcomes of these labor pains leave no one unaffected. The rebirth of certain characters is a vicarious thrill for those of us with vested interest in second chances. Instead of just enduring life, these women transform it. Author Richard Peck may be best known for his many young adult novels, but London Holiday, his fourth novel for adults, is further proof that he is as accurate an observer of older hearts as he is of less experienced ones.

Reviewed by Joanna Brichetto.

In 1998, The Diary of Bridget Jones allowed readers a peek at the not-so-private life of Bridget Jones, a 30-something, eternally dieting, single girl caught in the undertow of career ambition. Her half-hearted attempts at a worthwhile career consumed some of her time, but Bridget was more concerned with her personal life and at the end of Diary, it seemed her persistence paid off.

Well, Bridget is back, and ready to enter a new phase of life, one of spirituality and truth. Bridget Jones: The Age of Reason picks up about a month following Diary. Mark Darcy is still around (quite a coup for Bridget, who rarely hangs on to a boyfriend long enough to call him one) and while she is no longer a Singleton, she is fast becoming a Smug-Going-Out-With-Someone. But, guilty-pleasured Bridget fans, don’t despair: Trouble always finds Bridget, usually at her own invitation. It doesn’t take long for Bridget, Shaz, Jude, and their complete library of self-help books to convince Bridget that she is Mark’s Just for Now Girl, and once again our dear heroine is catapulted back into the familiar and dreaded world of Singletons.

Magda and Jeremy pop in and out from their Smug Married Life, and have Vile Richard and Pretentious Jerome mended their ways? Depends on who’s talking. Unfortunately, Tom does not happen ’round as much as we would like; well, after all, we were there for him during his nose job and musings about Pretentious Jerome in Diary, only to have him deliver most of his witticisms via telephone in Reason? How dare he? How dare Fielding? Instead, we get a large dose of Mum and Shaz, and they are annoying (thanks to Fielding’s clever writing). And Bridget, still being abused by her crazed boss Richard Finch (not to be confused with Jude’s Vile Richard), does manage a short-lived career high when she interviews Colin Firth in Italy. She also hits a new low when she is imprisoned in Thailand for drug trafficking. While prison life is often over the top (even for Bridget), most readers will empathize with her longing for a shower and a copy of Marie Claire.

I didn’t think it could be done, but Fielding has once again written a laugh out loud chronicle of Bridget Jones’s misadventures. And yes, someone does leave the ranks of Singleton permanently, but to become a Smug Married? Never! Don’t be fooled into thinking you’re too high-browed for this sort of fun, for Bridget is a case in point: Pride cometh before the fall.

Abbey Anclaude is a former teacher who writes from her home in Nashville, Tennessee.