Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant’s latest novel, Far From the Tree, is about three difficult women in the Frazier family: the proud Della and her daughters, Celeste and Ronnie, who find themselves, to their dismay, breathing the same air in the same house when they gather for the funeral of the family patriarch.

The title of the book is appropriate, since both sisters are as stubborn and unforthcoming as their mother, a woman whose tightlipped grief over her husband’s death is made worse when she discovers that her daughters have inherited a house in North Carolina that Della long ago signed over to her late husband. Della doesn’t want to think of this house ever again, and she considers disinheriting her daughters for wanting to go down South to check the place out. As the novel proceeds, we learn the reasons behind Della’s rage and witness the slow unfolding of the terrible memories the house holds for her.

On the way, the reader is treated to keenly drawn characters, including the three Frazier women and the people around them. Celeste, control freak and social climber, is a high school counselor known for the insight and compassion she gives to her students but withholds from her long suffering husband, college-age daughter, and her mother. Ronnie is a bitter, failed model whose moment of glory was on a billboard nearly two decades earlier. The authors give a remarkably adept description of Ronnie’s sad, struggling life in New York. Their portrayal of cramped, dingy, overpriced apartments, crazy or dangerous roommates, and the near-panic of a model whose looks are fading and who is always a paycheck away from eviction are realistic enough to make the reader cringe.

The three women treat each other with an almost reflexive incivility that makes the reader want to line them up against a wall and smack them, another mark of the authors’ skills. We even wonder how the recently deceased Will Frazier, who seemed a bumbling, gentle, and responsible man, put up with them. At the end, the women learn better, but their evolution is gradual and incomplete. That two authors could have put together such a seamless work is intriguing in itself. Far From The Tree is a convincing look at realistic flawed characters.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

For most readers of Nora, Nora, the title character will steal the show. A whiff of scandal accompanies Nora’s arrival in Lytton, a sleepy, rural Georgia town. She smokes, cusses, and wears a T-shirt that says, “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” It’s 1961 and Nora wants revolution. She wants it now. She tries to railroad Lytton with change, teaching Tropic of Cancer in a public high school barely ready for To Kill a Mockingbird. Nora’s seeming cynicism masks a more fundamental naivete. She believes that if she shows people the new horizons they hunger for, they will guard her secrets. That she is betrayed from almost every side is the novel’s central heartbreak.

Siddons has written a string of bestsellers, including Low Country and Outer Banks, whose titles reflect their Southern settings. The author’s finest achievement in her new book may be with the character Peyton, a 12-year-old girl hovering unwillingly on the brink of adulthood in an era when gender dictated more rigid roles than it does now. Siddons accurately captures the impulse that leads even the best-hearted adults to make children over in their own image.

One of the novel’s funniest and most painful episodes is Peyton’s trip to the beauty parlor, where tomboy Peyton is made over into a southern belle, complete with heavy makeup, under her aunt’s iron hand. The next day, Peyton gets transformed, yet again, into the image of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by her nightclub hopping, feminist cousin Nora.

Nora, Nora effectively explores the extent to which people fail to change. The novel’s three principle characters are trapped not only in the mores of a small southern town, which the civil rights movement threatens to leave behind, but also in their own individual comfort zones. Even Peyton’s likable father, Frazier, a lawyer and advocate of integration, presses only so hard for badly needed reforms to Lytton’s school and class systems.

Change and transformation don’t come as easily to people in real life as they do in the movies, and Siddons shows us that reality.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

With the summer’s heat still upon us, wouldn’t it be nice to take a break and read about someplace cool and inviting? After a five-year absence from the bookstore shelves, beloved Scottish author Rosamunde Pilcher offers her readers a refreshing respite with her latest offering, Winter Solstice.

Pilcher’s delightful tale is set amongst her favorite places London, Hampshire, and Cornwall, England, and the great highlands of Scotland. Her story, which begins as fall turns to winter, follows the lives of five distinctly different people and their search for happiness.

The main character, who binds the entire story together, is Elfrida Phipps, a gently eccentric former actress who has retired to live out her life in a comfortable fashion. When her dear friend Oscar Blundell loses his wife and daughter to a tragic car accident, Elfrida steps in to help Oscar get on with his life. Oscar owns half of an old estate house in Scotland, and it is here that he and Elfrida start their lives anew. As they settle in to a life of quiet contemplation, their plans for a solitary Christmas are interrupted when Elfrida’s cousin, Carrie Sutton, comes to visit along with her young niece, Lucy. It seems Carrie is quietly recovering from the heartbreak of a failed love affair with a married man, and Lucy’s self-centered mother and grandmother have abandoned the teenager during the holidays. The house party becomes even livelier with the arrival of Sam Howard, a handsome textile-company executive who has unexpectedly come to buy the estate house.

While each character is plagued with loneliness and regret, it seems as if fate has united them in the dilapidated old house. And it is in this house, on the shortest day of the year, that these five people will find each other, and ultimately find happiness for themselves. As in her previous bestsellers, The Shell Seekers, September and Coming Home, Winter Solstice is filled with the grace, warmth, and sentiment Pilcher’s legions of fans have come to expect from her books. But it also delivers an extraordinary tale of tragedy and intrigue, with a powerful testament of love’s healing ways that will undoubtedly draw a whole new audience to this remarkable novel. Winter Solstice was well worth the five-year wait.

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

Patricia Gaffney has done it again. In The Saving Graces, she wove characters so real you felt a part of their friendships. Now, in Circle of Three, she spins a tale about a family so genuine you will swear you know them.

Like her first novel, Circle of Three has women at its center: a grandmother, Dana; a mother, Carrie; and a daughter, Ruth. Gaffney has the women take turns telling their stories so that, chapter by chapter, the threads of their lives braid into a multi-leveled plot.

Each woman is struggling with the constraints of her generation. Dana, facing the physical frailties that come with growing old, has fought to build an illusion of the life she would like and is afraid it will somehow evaporate. Carrie, adapting to the death of a husband she did not love, is 42 and reestablishing a relationship with Jesse, a man she has loved since high school. Ruth, in the midst of teenage angst, decides the way to grow up and retaliate against her mother for being with Jesse so soon into widowhood is to get a tattoo. Each character will remind you of someone you know, someone quirky and likable, but annoying. There are men in the lives of each woman, though all but one are more observers than doers. Dana’s George barely speaks and is content to go outside and smoke in solitude. Raven, Ruth’s boyfriend, dresses like a vampire and ignores Ruth after a make-out session in the graveyard. Even Carrie’s dead husband Steve is notable only in his dying. It is Jesse who takes action, and it is because of Jesse that the circle of three is stretched almost to the breaking point.

It is in the pushing and pulling of each generation against the others that they are tied even more tightly together. The commitment they feel for each other is as much a part of them as the genes they share, and it is this commitment and shared history that provide the strength to move forward. It is also what will remind you why you continue to remain tied to your own family.

Jamie Whitfield writes from her homes in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Connie Green wasn’t bargaining for trouble when she arrived in Blackpool for a networking conference. In fact, she would have preferred to stay at home with her loving husband Luke and invite their equally loving friends over for dinner. So when she finds herself flirting with John Harding and they wind up at another conference in Paris, Connie finds the lines between adultery and fidelity blurring. It doesn’t take long before she can no longer tell the difference, nor does she care.

In the meantime, Connie’s friends Sam, Daisy, Rose, and Lucy are leading hit-or-miss lives of their own. Connie’s life is something of a fairytale: She left the carefree days of many lovers (which eludes the noncommittal, ruthless Lucy); found a wonderful husband (which eludes Daisy and Sam); and still manages to have fun (which eludes Rose, an ex-corporate up-and-comer now saddled with children). So why would Connie even look at another man? Connie isn’t sure of the whys either, but very quickly arrives at a point of obsession. John feeds this obsession, and soon discretion is dismissed as well. One by one, Connie’s friends uncover the truth, with varied opinions about her behavior: Lucy coaches her, Sam tolerates her, and Daisy is mortified. Then there’s Rose, who ultimately finds herself in the same vulnerable position as Luke. The most unlikely source of confrontation, Rose helps Connie reassess what is important to her and how far she’ll go to retrieve it. It is then that Connie finally realizes the magnitude of her sin.

Readers will find the first half of Playing Away disturbing; the idea that Connie is getting away with blatant adultery without repercussion is shocking. Ironically, readers will also like Connie; she truly is a likable character, making it very difficult to hate her or turn a deaf ear when she explains her actions and feelings. Wanting to hug her instead of thrash her is even more disturbing than Connie’s actions, but Connie does eventually pay, and she pays dearly. Adele Parks mingles humor with dark, realistic themes of boredom and isolation. Some may regard the ending as sappy, but after all the suffering, no other ending would suffice for such an endearing crew of friends.

Abbey Anclaude is a former schoolteacher.

Thirty-six-year-old Patty Murphy has waited patiently for her husband and children. Unfortunately her patience has not paid off. Patty is essentially a homemaker disguised as an unmarried real estate salesperson, a distinction she would not deny. As the narrator of Elizabeth Berg’s latest novel, Until the Real Thing Comes Along, Patty makes these points perfectly clear within the first few pages.

She readily admits that she has, in her two years at Rodman Real Estate, managed to sell one house (which happened to sell for $3.2 million). Despite her less-than-ambitious career, she enjoys the real estate business; her desire to be a wife and mother, however, overshadows any joy that she receives from showing houses. As Patty’s story unravels, the reader/confidante is taken through a maze of scenarios and reflections that center around a fictitious husband and a multitude of make-believe children.

Patty has known since the sixth grade who would make the perfect husband and father: Ethan Allen Gaines. She and Ethan are very close, and have even been engaged. Their engagement was broken when Ethan confessed that he is homosexual. The good news is, they have remained good friends, though the relationship is often frustrated by Patty’s lingering love and blind hope that Ethan is simply going through a phase.

Two things that both Patty and Ethan desire are the right man and many children. And since neither have any prospects in either area, they decide to have a child themselves. Though Patty’s pregnancy does not match the daydreams that had danced in her head for 36 years, she is happy with their decision . . . right? Factored into the Patty Murphy equation are an elderly couple whose days are numbered, a love her/hate her beautiful best friend, and two worried parents. And while Patty’s encounters with each character are amusing, there is an underlying, inexplicable sadness that tends to permeate each relationship. This sadness culminates when Patty discovers that her mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Amid these trials of life, Patty begins to focus on what the real thing actually is. A self-proclaimed runner-up in the pageant of life, Patty realizes that perhaps the real thing includes loving someone or something despite itself. Because of itself, actually. A warm-hearted story that gently offers insight rather than answers, Until the Real Thing Comes Along would especially appeal to those who have survived loss and crisis.

You won’t find the women in Faith Sullivan’s new novel wringing their hands and moaning What’s a woman to do? Sullivan turns that phrase on its edge and renders it a call for action in the title of her latest novel, What a Woman Must Do.

But life doesn’t always neatly dictate where duty lies. Kate, Harriet, and Bess, Sullivan’s trio of related main characters, struggle inwardly with their personal dilemmas. Each knows her actions will affect the others, and their choices, though individual and honest, are not made easily.

Bess, the youngest, has been raised by her aunts and yearns for adventure beyond the streets of Harvester, Minnesota. But just before she is to leave for college, Bess risks her future by falling for a local married man. Harriet is the middle-aged cousin who wants desperately to have a home of her own, and though it may mean losing her beloved Bess’s approval, she goes to the Dakota dance hall to kick up her heels with a widowed farmer. And then there’s the aging but spirited Kate, fighting with ghosts from the past and reproaching herself for things she should have done as a woman despite her fears and the conventions of her youth.

Though separated by generational differences, each cares deeply for the other, for regaining and maintaining their family’s respectability, and for the men they come to love. But it is Kate’s fervent longing for the farm she has lost, her love for the land she once lived with so intimately, that becomes the narrative’s overriding passion and its idyllic backdrop. Heaven will be a farm, she tells herself. And we will own it outright. Sullivan uses a condensed time frame a mere three days and like a play, the story moves swiftly through its web of conflicts to its crisis. A variety of techniques flesh out the characters and bring the past into relevancy with the present; flashbacks, dreams, and Kate’s ability to conjure her beloved farm to the point where she is not simply imagining, but there, give us insight into the characters’ motivations.

If you are looking for an intriguing tale of love and relationships mixed with distinctive female characters and a dash of family scandal, get Faith Sullivan’s new book and find out What a Woman Must Do.

Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.

Filled with romance, intrigue, revenge, and salvation, Lake News, the latest novel by best-selling author Barbara Delinsky, is a gripping tale sure to please her legions of loyal fans and earn her quite a few new ones.

Lily Blake is a quiet young woman leading a quiet life in Boston. She teaches music appreciation at a private academy, but her real love in life is playing piano and singing the old favorites at the Essex, an exclusive dining club which boasts among its members the newly installed Cardinal Fran Rossetti. Having known the cleric all her adult life, Lily considers the Cardinal one of her closest friends and advisors. But when Terry Sullivan, a devious newspaper reporter with a secret agenda, accuses her of having an affair with her dear friend, Lily becomes a pariah overnight.

Lily finds herself unable to return to her Boston apartment, where reporters are permanently camped out. Embarrassed by the false revelations, friends, neighbors, and employers begin to shun Lily, and she soon realizes she has no alternative but to escape to her hometown of Lake Henry. Vulnerable and wary, she makes the trip home. Once there, she must dodge sneaky reporters and confront old demons in the face of a cold and unloving mother and a town still whispering gossip about her youthful indiscretions.

John Kipling, the editor of the Lake News, knows all about the emotional trauma Lily Blake is going through. He used to be one of those rumor-mongering reporters in the big city himself, until one day it just got to be too much and he too retreated homeward, with trust issues and family problems of his own. But John knows just what to do to help Lily exact her revenge on the reporter who ruined her life and, in the process, gets a little redemption himself. He just didn’t plan on falling in love with Lily along the way.

Lake News has just enough mystery to keep readers on the edges of their seats, and just enough romance to make them all sigh.

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

Cheaters is a 368-page Jerry Springer moment. Both of Dickey’s main characters, Chante and Stephan, are poster children for dysfunctional people. Stephan is a self-described player although his game is a bit off. In fact, he gets caught at his own game and finds out what the wrath of a woman scorned can be. Chante, on the other hand, finds herself in between being dumped and being the other woman. Needless to say, these two misfits meet, feign disinterest, and fall rapidly into fledgling, drama-packed romance. The secondary characters are particularly intriguing. Dawn is an unsupportive wife. Darnell is her misunderstood husband and a struggling writer. Tammy is a creative spirit who captures Darnell’s imagination. What will happen? Will Darnell and Tammy cheat? Why? Why not? Readers will want to find out. Dickey’s best attribute is his ability to effortlessly capture the language of the Hip Hop generation. For example, after visiting a museum with Stephan, Chante says, We checked out Rhapsodies in Black, a phat [superb] showcase of art from the Harlem Renaissance. It’s this almost perfect intonation in this case, the right balance between colloquial and proper speech that makes Cheaters feel and sound real. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries, Dickey doesn’t rely on cheap tricks like placing Chante in designer clothing to signal her social status. Instead, we get class-based tension between Chante and her friend Karen, which allows for a richer narrative.

While Dickey opens interesting doors, readers are not always pulled through them a slight frustration. Issues such as class and cast are mentioned but not aptly dealt with. Still, Mr. Dickey didn’t set out to formally address such serious issues. Instead, Cheaters reads like a beach book it’s fun, full of raunchy behavior and great one-liners. One hopes real people don’t be have so badly. But, this reviewer will admit, it’s enjoyable to read about characters who do. Jerry Springer would gladly pay these characters to be on his show.

Crystal Williams is a poet in Ithaca, New York.

The summer is as good a time as any to add new friends to your life, and reading The Saving Graces is certain to add at least four: Emma, Rudy, Lee, and Isabel. By the time you’ve finished the novel, you will feel as though you not only know these four women, but you’ll miss them the way you miss good friends.

Each of these four friends takes turns telling the story of the Graces a group of women who years ago began meeting periodically to discuss a women’s topic. Chapter by chapter, each woman reveals details about herself through the choices she makes in what to reveal about the others, until you’re gradually aware that you have become one of this group and are being told things the others don’t know.

Rudy and Lee slowly reveal the unhappiness of their marriages one of them finally deciding to end the destructive relationship and the other discovering the real reason for her unhappiness. Emma, who thinks of men as speed bumps, is very open with the reader about her coveting a married man. While the other three eventually learn about her unfulfilled longings, she lets only the reader and one other friend know who he is and what a road block he has become. Isabel, the oldest of the Graces, seems to emanate grace and wisdom as she faces the hardest decisions. In the end, it is her wisdom and foresight that allow the Graces to continue after what could have caused the group to disband.

Men, hairstyles, an abandoned dog, and food not exactly women’s topics, but as Emma puts it, We’ve already talked about everything under the sun. There’s nothing left. As in a typical group of friends, someone disagrees. Lee thinks they’ve all become lazier and just find it easier to gossip than to organize a discussion topic. Thank goodness for disorganization! It is what allows us to learn the story of four unusual women who form a group we would all like to join. It is what allows us to think of each of them as a new friend and to miss each one the minute the last page of The Saving Graces is read.

Jamie Whitfield writes from her home in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

If you’re feeling stressed, but can’t afford that getaway weekend in the Caribbean don’t despair. Grab your lawnchair, find a patch of filtered sun, inhale deeply and enter Karen Stolz’s World of Pies. Although set in the turbulent ’60s, this novel about growing up in a small Texas town will fill you with a sweet nostalgia that goes down as easily as Mabel’s Angel Food Cake with Chocolate Sauce. (Recipe included!) Comfort food recipes are, in fact, sprinkled throughout World of Pies, but Stolz’s real accomplishment in this taste-tempting first novel is the delicious batch of episodes she has baked up for us about the life of Roxanne Milner, a baseball-loving tomboy whose first-person narrative rings with the honest emotions the exhilaration and devastation, the confusion and wonder of growing up.

In the hot summer of ’61, 12-year-old Roxanne would rather be out pitching balls to her cousin Tommy than in the kitchen rolling pie dough, but the ensuing pie fair has the townswomen in a baking frenzy as they strive to perfect their individual recipes for the contest. But “at the eleventh hour,” to her mother’s delight and her own surprise, Roxanne develops an interest in the art that affords the mother a chance to teach and the daughter to learn. “And it happened,” she says, amazed at her ability to be gentle and precise. “I got the feel of the dough and learned how to make a decent piecrust.” The lessons she learns are not confined to the kitchen as race becomes a factor in the pie contest, the Vietnam War looms, and she gets her first, less-than-riveting kiss. While trying to figure out boys, and believing she will never look “right,” Roxanne experiences the consequences of taking a stand against racism in her small hometown, she gains insight into the complexities of her parents’ marriage and eventually explores her own burgeoning awareness of the increasingly attractive opposite sex.

Stolz packs a lot into 153 pages. Written with a flair for understatement and the telling detail, this humorous, relationship-rich tale is wholly satisfying. It may be a slim volume, but I found it a deep dish, full of insight into the human heart.

You’ll want to savor Roxanne’s adventures along with her recipes, so you may want to bake ahead. Then you won’t have to stop turning pages to check the oven! Lemonade, anyone? Linda Stankard is a writer in Cookeville, Tennessee, who believes in the restorative powers of baked goods.

Twenty-one-year-old Leandra was estranged from her sister and had never flown on an airplane or been outside her native North Carolina more than once. That, however, didn’t keep her from flying to Massachusetts immediately after her sister, Pamela, asked for her help during a difficult pregnancy. Little did Leandra’s much older brother-in-law, William, know when he first saw her at the airport that he would enter into a brief but passionate love affair with her not too long afterward. Little did both of them know that tragedy would soon follow this affair, and again a decade later.

But sometimes the foreknowledge of tragedy can illuminate startling beauty. In Susan Dodd’s mature, poignant, and warm-hearted third novel, The Mourner’s Bench, she shows the simple and strong ways that two seemingly incompatible people can find the consolation and love they need within each other.

At the novel’s beginning, Leandra is living alone in her house on the coast of North Carolina, mending dolls by vocation and still mulling over the deaths of her sister and her sister’s baby. William, or Wim, is dying of cancer and is traveling down South to see Leandra for the first time in ten years. Though he has remarried, he has decided that he is going to spend the rest of his short time left with Leandra that is, if she will let him.

Dodd, who has taught at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, demonstrates her mastery of the English language by telling the powerful story in two distinct voices: the literary and decidedly high-brow tone of Wim, and the wise and just plain wise-cracking Southern style of Leandra. The two different voices allow Dodd to show the vulnerabilities of her two characters and the grace with which they accept the emotional baggage they will carry for the rest of their lives.

Through the comfort she conjures through telling details the preparation of a simple meal, the glow from stars overhead, the feel of a rose-colored comforter when one is bone-tired Dodd also shows that, ultimately, the connections that most reward are the ones that need no extra adornment. Loss and tragedy are unavoidable in life (and certainly in the ending of Dodd’s novel), but through it all, Leandra and Wim show that the chance to love and be loved is reassuringly near.

Deb Saine is a reviewer in Rock Hill, South Carolina.