What are you reading this summer?

I love being from the south and all things southern (with a few exception of boiled peanuts). One of the things I enjoy most is finding a good book set in the south, one that really understands the people and their customs.

A few weeks ago we stayed in a condominium in Hilton Head that was filled with books. I picked up one that I thought looked enticing and headed to the beach. The book was so good I finished it in just a day or so. The book was Sullivan’s Island by Dorthea Benton Frank.

Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly said about it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Frank’s debut novel is a story of redemption set in South Carolina’s steamy low country. Susan Hamilton Hayes’s comfortable Charleston existence is shattered when she finds her husband in bed with another woman. Faced with a failed marriage, a confused teenage daughter and a mediocre job, she sets about the business of healing. Slowly, supported by visits to her sister in their childhood home on sleepy Sullivan’s Island, Susan becomes a successful newspaper columnist, regains her confidence as a woman (despite a hilariously deflating date) and finally explores the death of her complex, abusive father decades before. Chapters alternate between the present and 1963, the year her father died, as Susan faces both the strength and the damaging effects of her family legacy. The ending – complete with a perfect suitor reemerging from Susan’s youth – is almost too picture perfect to ring true but both the setting and the characters are blazingly authentic. Frank evokes the eccentric Hamilton family and their feisty Gullah housekeeper with originality and conviction; Susan herself – smart, sarcastic, funny and endearingly flawed – makes a lively and memorable narrator. Thanks to these scrappily compelling portraits, this is a rich read.

The author, Dorthea Benton Frank, was in Bowling Green, Kentucky this week on a book tour. I had every intention of going to meet her and hear her speak but some things came up at the last minute and I didn’t make it.

Here is a short bio written by Ms. Frank:

I am the author of eleven novels placed in and around the Lowcountry of South Carolina and thanking God for my chance to speak. When I’m not writing, I’m reading or gardening or cooking. Love to travel, shoot the bull with people and most of all, be with my husband, children and dogs – not always necessarily in that order. Just finished my eleventh book – Lowcountry Summer for William Morrow and it will come out June 15, 2010. Love to have company so come visit at www.dotfrank.com. And by the way, serious huge gushing thanks for everything – your kind words and emails. Writing saves me, but without your support it wouldn’t mean much. (So I’m a little sappy and sentimental – big deal.) xxoo Dot

Her characters are so real and each of them remind me of someone I have known. I just purchased another one of her books and plan to read all of them. She’s a great writer and I’m really enjoying being transported in my mind to another place and time!

I really wish I could have met her and I also wish I could get to know her as a person. I have a sneaking suspicion that we would hit it off like a pack of firecrackers on the 4th of July. I love her sense of humor and like I said, I feel like I have known people exactly like the characters in her book.

Could it be we are “kindred spirits?”  I will probably never know but I do plan on getting to know her better through her books!