Blue Calhoun narrates the story of his adult years in Raleigh during the 1950s from the distance of old age.  He begins his story in his mid-thirties, when he is working at a store that sells sheet music and instruments.  One day at work, an old friend from school stops by the store with her daughter Luna, who is not much older than Blue’s daughter Madelyn.  At 16, Luna is a talented young musician, and her dark hair, good looks, and confidence catch Blue’s interest.  As the story unfolds, Blue has to grapple with his feelings for Luna and wanting to protect his wife and daughter.  Second and third chances can’t prevent how the reverberations of how Blue’s unfaithful actions will affect his family, including his granddaughter, for whom the story is narrated.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 20th, 2009 under 1990-1999, 1992, Piedmont, Price, Reynolds, Wake.
Comments: none

The year is 1945 in this sequel to Hostetter’s earlier novel, Blue.  Ann Fay has returned from treatment in a polio hospital and her beloved father is back from the war.  Ann Fay thinks that she understands the changes that occurred at home during the war–the deprivation, the polio epidemic that killed her younger brother and disabled her–but she has no understanding of what her father went through.  Her father suffers from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.  Ann Fay and her father are both in search of healing and peace of mind–”comfort”.   Ann Fay is helped on her path by caring neighbors and treatment at the Warm Springs, Georgia polio treatment center.  Her father’s healing path is lonelier and the outcome uncertain.

Comfort touches on themes of family, community, racial prejudice, and social class, but the novel never bogs down in any way.  Ann Fay’s voice rings true in this beautiful coming-of-age story.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 13th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Catawba, Children & Young Adults, Hostetter, Joyce Moyer, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Ella Dubose, a 70-something Southern lady, has been a Charlotte resident for almost a half a century, but she left some part of her heart in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.  When her younger children start to pester her about her her driving and her health (they thinks she’s getting senile), Ella takes off for a small inn at Myrtle Beach.  There she reflects on her early life in South Carolina, especially her relationship with the man who might be the father of her eldest son.  She summons that son to join her at the inn.  Will she have the courage to tell him about her early life, or will the prospect of a romance with another guest at the inn turn her mind to happier things?

Most of the action in this novel takes place in South Carolina.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 2nd, 2009 under 2000-, 2008, Mecklenburg, Piedmont, Villas, James.
Comments: none

Zeb Dupree is down on his luck in New Orleans when he finds a one-eyed abandoned puppy in a trash can.  Zeb’s wife is leaving him for another man, his father recently committed suicide, and he just lost his job as a newspaper editor.   In the midst of this mid-life crisis, Zeb heads back to Cedar Springs, North Carolina, the town where he attended college on a scholarship in the 1960s.

The novel alternates between the present and flashbacks of Zeb’s life growing up in the fictional Seaton, N.C.   This emotional shuffling between the past and present intensifies Zeb’s struggling efforts to rebuild his life.   After his return to Cedar Springs, Zeb works as a condo painter and a fiddler in a traveling country-rock band, dates an artist named Jenny, and tries to reconnect with his family.   His family members are also plagued by the loss of their father and the stress experienced by a younger brother who is a Vietnam vet.   Zeb begins to find peace (or at least patience) when he buys the property surrounding his father’s old house and begins to renovate the structure and farm the land.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, March, Stephen, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Dorothy Borden is the much-loved daughter of Granston’s first African American lawyer. Dorothy went north for her education, but after a failed marriage she comes back home.  If her first marriage was a mistake, her second marriage is a disaster.  Joe Cephus Divine is the town’s first black police officer.  Joe is a proud but angry man.  To improve his status, Joe plans to marry an educated woman, preferably a school teacher.  Dorothy is a college professor, and she soon flees his abuse.  When Joe marries again, the shoe is on the other foot.  Johnnye Jamison, a school teacher from Pennsylvania, may feign interest in the men who pursue her, but for her marriage is just the route to a man’s money.  With drugs supplied by a lover elsewhere, Johnnye kills off her husbands.  Years later when Dorothy returns to Granston, she learns what happened to Joe and she comes to terms with her own choices and the town she grew up in.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Bowen, Sandra E., Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Alma Curtis is a bit of a busybody, but she is also a loyal member of King’s Chapel, an historic African-American church in Lovette, North Carolina.  Arriving early to make the final preparations for the church’s 100th anniversary service, she is shocked to hear her pastor, Jonathan Pierce, being threatened by Myron King, the great-grandson of the church’s founder. Winston Beckana is a relative newcomer to the church, but when the church secretary asks Winston, a retired computer expert, to look at the church’s financial records, he can see that something is wrong.  Pastor Pierce knows that something is wrong–his wife is addicted to cocaine and her addiction has put the pastor under King’s thumb. The Pierces know that the situation can’t go on, but when Winston Beckana is murdered, they realize that others in their community have been hurt by their weaknesses.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 26th, 2009 under 2000-, 2007, McFarland, Shirlita K., Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

To Make My Bread follows the McClure family during the years 1900-1929.  Initially, they are mountaineers, self-sufficient on their small plot of land.  Most of their neighbors live as they do, except for the Swains, who own the store in their community.  When the family is swindled out of their land by timber speculators, they move to a mill town forty miles away.

Not all family members adjust to the move.  The two younger children, John and Bonnie become the primary breadwinners, and they are radicalized by their experiences. Bonnie also struggles with the conflict between the demands of industrialized work and traditional expectations for women.  She becomes an important figure in the nascent labor movement in the town.

Part family saga, part political novel, To Make My Bread is one of six novels from the 1930s  based on the Gastonia textile strike of 1929.  The book has been the subject of academic study, and it is still in print from the University of Illinois Press.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 13th, 2009 under 1930-1939, 1932, Gaston, Historical, Lumpkin, Grace, Mountains, Piedmont.
Comments: none

People who have been in this area for some time will be delighted to see that Alexandra Sokoloff is bringing the work of J. B. and Louisa Rhine to the attention of a new generation.  From the 1920s to 1965, the Rhine parapsychology research lab at Duke University added the spice of parapsychology to the local intellectual scene.  The Rhines investigated ESP, psychokinesis, and poltergeists.  In The Unseen, Laurel MacDonald has left heartbreak in California and moved east to join the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.  Professor MacDonald’s area of research involves Myers-Briggs typology, but when a library exhibit rekindles her interest in the work of the Rhines, she moves out of her safety zone in more than one sense.  She and a handsome co-worker enlist two exceptional students to help duplicate earlier investigations of poltergeists.  The four move to Folger House, an estate in Moore County and the site of poltergeist manifestations decades before. The tensions and suspicions among the researchers are nothing compared to what they encounter at Folger House.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: September 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Coastal Plain, Durham, Moore, Piedmont, Sokoloff, Alexandra, Suspense/Thriller.
Comments: none

In this introspective novel we follow the narrator, Mandy, from her early childhood through to middle age.  Initially, her family is poor, but stable, in Depression-era North Carolina.  When her brothers leave the farm and her mother dies, Mandy’s life takes a turn for the worse. One day she kills her drunken, abusive father and then is sent to Dorothea Dix Hospital.  During her years at Dix, she comes to understand herself and other people, and upon release finds her way to love and a more normal life.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: September 21st, 2009 under 2000-, 2008, Cocolin, Theresa, Piedmont, Wake.
Comments: none

Botanist and garden shop owner Peggy Lee is having a bad time of it.  The worst drought in North Carolina history has killed the business at Peggy’s shop, The Potting Shed, and Peggy’s parents have moved to Charlotte, forcing Peggy to hide boyfriend Steve’s live-in status.  Because business is so slow, Peggy agrees to go with her mother on an artifact dig.  Instead of finding old pottery shards and bones, they uncover a fresh corpse. The “dead geriatric socialite” (the indelicate words of the first policeman on the scene) is one of the most esteemed members of the Shamrock Historical Society–and the aunt of the police chief.  The ladies want to know what’s happened, and so does the Charlotte power structure. When it appears that the victim died from ingesting yew berries, Peggy knows she has to get involved.  The book includes tips for successful gardening when water is in short supply.

This is the fifth novel in the Peggy Lee Garden Mysteries series.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: September 13th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Lavene, Jim and Joyce, Mecklenburg, Mystery, Novels in Series, Piedmont.
Comments: none