very once in a great while, a book comes along that you absolutely adore. You devour every word and are terribly misty-eyed when it ends. Then, miracle of miracles, the author decides to pen a sequel to that brilliant book and you’re again enraptured. Big Cherry Holler is the follow-up to Big Stone Gap, Adriana Trigiani’s best-selling debut novel. In the sequel, Trigiani takes her readers back to the small town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where we catch up on the lives of those quirky and fascinating townfolk who so intrigued us before.

In the eight years since town pharmacist Ave Maria Mulligan married her true love, coal miner Jack MacChesney, the couple has had a daughter, Etta, and a son, Joe, who died at the tender age of four. They have settled into the comfortable routine of family life. But even with her joy at being a mother and wife, Ave Maria begins to feel something is missing in her life. She and Jack Mac are just not as happy as she thinks they should be, and bit by bit she feels him slipping away. As things begin to fall apart, Ave Maria takes her daughter to Italy to spend the summer with relatives. While there, she meets a handsome stranger who offers her an eye-opening look at life beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stunned at her reawakened feelings of passion, Ave Maria is forced to define what is truly important to her her marriage, her family and her home.

This time around, Trigiani tells the heart-wrenching story of a marriage with all its deep dark secrets, struggles for equality and whispers of unfulfilled expectations that often exist between husband and wife. She also tells the story of a community that must reinvent itself as it comes to grips with the closing of the coal mine that has always provided employment for the town. Big Cherry Holler is an intricate tale of two people who have temporarily forgotten the reasons they came to love each other in the first place, and their journey to find that spark again. Readers will find a little bit of everything in this heart-warming novel humor, romance, wisdom and drama are all represented in the beautiful mountain settings of Virginia and Italy. Trigiani has created another keeper.

Sharon Galligar Chance is a book reviewer in Wichita Falls, Texas.

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.

Perhaps it’s best to tell the reader right off the bat that the feisty Viola Price, matriarch of Terry McMillan’s latest novel A Day Late and a Dollar Short, dies halfway through the book. McMillan etches the character so vividly that when she passes away, the reader grieves, and indeed the loss of Viola’s robust, irritated, comical voice leaves an empty spot in the narrative. In terms of the book’s overall appeal, however, it hardly matters.

One of McMillan’s greatest strengths is her spot-on characterization of people and situations you recognize, especially if you’re an African-American woman. Yes, that’s my mother, one mutters, shaking one’s head ruefully. Or that’s my Aunt So and So, or Cousin Ditz, or my best friend or that numbskull I used to date. Once in a while one will be even tempted to admit, yes, that’s me, but don’t tell anybody.

McMillan’s latest novel opens with Viola in the hospital for one of her asthma attacks, contemplating her wayward children. They are the perfectionist Paris, a successful caterer still chafing under the burden of being the oldest child; the prickly Charlotte, who still believes, a la Tommy Smothers, that her mother liked Paris best; Lewis, the loser with the genius level IQ who can’t seem to stay out of trouble even if he tries; and Janelle, the dingbat whose lifelong flightiness is stopped only by an outrageous crime committed against her adolescent daughter. There’s also Viola’s estranged husband, Cecil, jheri-curled and polyester clad, who has taken up with a young welfare mom. As with most of McMillan’s books, the narrative voice is straightforward, with an acerbic humor like a bite into a not quite ripe persimmon. We can tell the players apart immediately; eventually we can recognize children and even fractious spouses and ex-spouses. In McMillan’s capable hands, even peripheral folks like Viola’s kindly next-door neighbor and her strange, waspish sisters are clearly drawn.

In the McMillan tradition the adult men, Lewis, Cecil and the sisters’ husbands and ex-husbands, are not what they ought to be. This isn’t man-bashing on McMillan’s part, but her conveyance of the truth that a lot of men are dogs, or dogs in training, and her ongoing examination of the mystery of why smart women hook up with them. Perhaps another part of McMillan’s popularity stems from the mistaken belief by many of her readers that, with their own nutty families and eye-popping messes, they, too, could have written Waiting to Exhale, or Stella or Mama if they only had the time!

All in all, A Day Late and a Dollar Short is more a snapshot of a critical moment in the ongoing travails of a particular family than a deep, analytical opus. Even momentous events like multiple pregnancies are kept subordinate to the main action of bickering kinfolk dealing with the death of their mother. In the end we regain something of Viola’s voice when the Prices gather after her funeral to read the letters she sent to each of them, and we realize we miss this stubborn, opinionated, funny lady. Not as much as her children, who come late to the realization that they did love one another after all.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

There is a conspiracy afoot. The publicity material accompanying Joanna Trollope’s splendid new novel, The Best of Friends, tries to present Trollope as merely a woman’s novelist, risking the condescension such categories imply. It describes her books as a “secret pleasure” and a “guilty delight.” Wherein lies the secrecy and guilt is not explained.

Do not be fooled by this marketing ploy. Joanna Trollope’s novels are not feverish little romances. Just remember that years before Trollope was catching on in the U.S. (she is practically a household name in England), all sorts of critics were praising her sensitivity to social nuance and strength of characterization. She is a genuine writer, a worthy descendant of Frances and Anthony.

If you haven’t read a Trollope novel yet, you may have seen one of them adapted on PBS perhaps the popular The Rector’s Wife. If not, The Best of Friends is a wonderful place to start. Like her other contemporary novels, it describes a cross-section of a community, particularly a couple of families and the shifting alliances between them.

Trollope excells at bringing to life several generations and allowing their varied perspectives to illuminate each other. She documents the confusions and frustrations of teenagers with the same precision and empathy that animates her elderly characters. What is most impressive about her writing is that she performs this legerdemain with the lightest touch, as if it were nothing special, as if anyone could do it. And she does so with an ironic, Olympean sense of humor reminiscent of Jane Austen’s.

No doubt it is the easy accessibility and familiar domestic plots that invite comparison to category fiction. But Trollope, while an optimist who writes about people faced with situations that demand their best efforts, eschews easy answers and forced happy endings. There are few villains in her books, although there is no shortage of unpleasantness. Mostly there are confused or embittered people who don’t mean to be behaving as badly as they sometimes do. The Best of Friends is the story of Gina, whose husband suddenly abandons her and their teenage daughter Sophy; of Sophy’s own coming-of-age; of Gina’s longtime friend Laurence, who ultimately falls in love with her; and of Laurence’s wife, Hilary, and their own children. We meet Gina’s mother Vi, who at 80 is cautiously discovering love again in her retirement community, and Hilary and Laurence’s son Gus, who at 14 is hopelessly infatuated with Sophy. Trollope makes these sad, ordinary events seem new and fresh. If you enjoy The Best of Friends, turn to earlier volumes. Especially recommended are The Men and the Girls and A Passionate Man. Like most serious writers, Trollope has chosen to explore the oldest subject the ancient human muddle of desire and yearning for a better life. There are no original stories; only individual visions, fresh candor, and a signature style. Joanna Trollope offers all three.

Reviewed by Michael Sims.

It all began with the idea of writing a story about a school assignment. It blossomed into the remarkable novel Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, an extraordinary tale that, like its young protagonist, just might change the world. When social studies teacher Reuben St. Clair writes on the blackboard, Think of an idea for world change, and put it into action, 12-year-old Trevor McKinney takes the assignment seriously and comes up with the concept of Paying Forward. His plan is fairly simple: He’ll do something really good for three people who, instead of paying him back, will be asked to pay it forward by aiding three more. Hard as he tries, Trevor’s initial attempts seem to fail. Time after time, the recipients of his good deeds let him down. But just when Trevor thinks his entire project has been for naught, things take a turn for the better and his efforts slowly snowball into a national phenomenon. Pay It Forward is Hyde’s second novel and, 20 years in the making, it is truly a labor of love. Telling the story of Trevor’s remarkable project from the alternating perspectives of Trevor’s diary and the people who are touched by the young boy’s vision, Hyde grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go until the novel’s passionate surprise ending.

Big things are expected of this book (there was already a movie deal in the works before its release), and with good reason. Pay It Forward is a delightfully uplifting, moving, and inspiring modern fable that has the power to change the world as we know it which would be a wonderful phenomenon indeed.

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

Islands are magical places, no doubt about it. Whether you live on one, as I do, vacation on one, or read about them, islands stir some deep core of fantasy. Island Justice is a satisfying island book. Elizabeth Winthrop understands and better still, makes us understand the feeling of a close-knit community that knows everyone else’s business and personal life, that pulls together when it needs to.

When Maggie Hammond’s godmother, Nan, dies and leaves her island home to Maggie, a sophisticated world traveler, a furniture conservator who works with museums in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Prague, Maggie sets about selling the cluttered Victorian house. The task of getting the house ready for sale takes longer than she expects, and Maggie gets caught up in off-season island life. The body of an island man, missing for several days, washes up on her beach. Islanders rally around his daughter and give Maggie, who found the body, the support she needs. “You’re entitled to fall apart,” she is told. She learns about a serious problem in one of the families. Should she remain silent, closing her eyes the way the islanders have been doing? Should she call in authorities from the mainland? What role should she play? In Island Justice, Winthrop packs onto her small island (12 miles long, three miles wide) adventure, romance, mystery, and humor. We learn a bit about furniture conservation, a bit about training Vishlas, hunting dogs. When Randy Baker spots a school of fish off the beach: “ÔHallelujah,’ he shouted, and got on the radio with a single call. He knew he was breaking the cardinal rule of the island. The radio was to be used only for emergencies. But the fishermen had come up with a simple code. . . . Within twenty minutes, there were twelve fishermen lining the beach, calling news of lures and catches to one another.” Kasha, Maggie’s Siberian husky, is hurt badly and must get to the mainland. The word goes out, “Get down to the ferry will you, and try to convince Dan to hold that boat.” Besides being a good yarn, the story has the feel of an island. We hear the bell buoy, the fog horn, the gulls, we struggle along with Maggie to back a car onto the ferry. I was sorry when I finished this wonderful, rich book. Now that I’ve discovered Elizabeth Winthrop, I am off to my favorite island bookstore to order her previous novel, In My Mother’s House.

Reviewed by Cynthia Riggs.

Barnaby Gaitlin is no prince. A quasi-reformed juvenile delinquent, Anne Tyler’s anti-hero in her new novel, A Patchwork Planet, has just celebrated his 30th birthday alone, swilling beer in his dank basement apartment. Still, Barnaby is a disheveled handyman with a heart, and Tyler’s 14th novel will not disappoint die-hard fans who cherish the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s knack for plainspoken storytelling.

Like most of Tyler’s novels, A Patchwork Planet is set in a Baltimore suburb, capturing a year in the life of an eclectic array of characters, primarily, the Gaitlin family. Barnaby, the proverbial black sheep of the bunch, has never managed to overcome his tarnished teenage years, when he soiled the Gaitlin name after he was arrested for burglary. His affluent family orchestrates a charitable foundation, but Barnaby is not impressed. His ill-fated marriage to the wholesome girl-next-door ended in a divorce after the birth of their daughter, Opal. Now, his ex-wife has married a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, and Barnaby has grown estranged from his only child.

A Patchwork Planet could have easily fallen into a predictable pattern, portraying the travails of a divorced dad who longs to be closer to his daughter. Tyler will have none of that with Barnaby, who is less than enthusiastic about his sporadic drives to Philly in his grandfather’s old Corvette. Indeed, Barnaby is passionate about two things: searching for his angel a mythical Gaitlin tradition and helping his elderly clients at Rent-A-Back, where he tackles odd-jobs alongside his co-worker, a scrappy, anemic-looking waif named Martine. Of course, Barnaby is searching for love, which arrives in the form of a plump, sweet-faced banker named Sophia. At last, Barnaby seems to have settled down, as Sophia’s hearty crock-pot meals and stolid serenity lull the former felon into a homespun nirvana. Even the Gaitlins approve of Sophia, and the romance blossoms with the blessing of Barnaby’s persnickety mother, Margot. But A Patchwork Planet is not a love story, and Tyler is too talented to serve up a neat and tidy conclusion. A common thread running through all of Tyler’s novels is the minutia of everyday the trips to the grocery store, the lace doilies and dusty furniture, and, above all, a deep respect for an average life. While many of Tyler’s prior novels have revolved around the struggles facing couples with teenage children (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Ladder of Years), at 57, the novelist seems to be taking a long, hard look at the so-called Golden Years.

It is a reflection that is alternately comedic and tragic, and Tyler does not shy away from the raw truth. As Barnaby’s aging clients whisper their fears and share their fading memories, he begins to believe that perhaps his search for a soul mate is pure folly. “At Rent-A-Back, I knew couples who’d been married almost forever. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s become the right person.” With A Patchwork Planet, Tyler has once again served up literary comfort food for the soul. While those who crave action and demand resolution may be frustrated by Tyler’s character-driven plots, even the most cynical reader will be charmed by Barnaby, and above all, an assortment of silver-haired saints.

Reviewed by Karen A. Cullotta.