Georgia

Bonnie said, "Here's another one for the state of Georgia. I've written a review of Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore on my blog."

The narrator is Catherine Grace Cline, a teenager who wants more than anything in this world to get out of the little town of Ringgold, Georgia. Her daddy is the preacher at Cedar Grove Baptist Church, which was founded by Catherine Grace's great-granddaddy William Floyd Cline, who had been "one of the most prolific bootleggers the state of Georgia has ever known" (p. 12). "William Floyd found the Lord somewhere in the congregation's third singing of the fourth verse of 'Just As I Am" (p. 13), and within days he was "sermonizing from his own makeshift pulpit next to a grove of cedar trees" (p. 14). When he died, his son took over the pulpit, and now Catherine Grace's daddy was the current Reverend Cline. A humorous look at one girl's desire to reach the big city of Atlanta.
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Maybe this will explain my long absence from this blog. Please re-submit any book suggestions you've made that I failed to get posted.
Thanks,
~~~ Bonnie

Georgia

Jill said, "Hi, Bonnie: I have finished my Georgia selection for this challenge - a delightful book called Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns. You can read my review here. I know, we need another Georgia book like a hole in the head - but this one does a good job portraying small-town Georgia life!"

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around - fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson - a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward - the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and not a little jealous of his grandpa's new wife, Will nevertheless approves of this May-December match and follows its progress with just a smidgen of youthful prurience. As the newlyweds' chaperone, conspirator, and confidant, Will is privy to his one-armed, renegade grandfather's second adolescence; meanwhile, he does some growing up of his own. He gets run over by a train and lives to tell about it; he kisses his first girl, and survives that too. Olive Ann Burns has given us a timeless, funny, resplendent novel - about a romance that rocks an entire town, about a boy's passage through the momentous but elusive year when childhood melts into adolescence, and about just how people lived and died in a small Southern town at the turn of the last century.

Georgia

Jill also suggests: "For Georgia, I would recommend Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in addition to the aforementioned GWTW." Here's Jill's review of the book.

This book of nonfiction by John Berendt, set in steamy Savannah, is written like a novel. The eccentric characters include society ladies, a redneck gigolo, a recluse, a profane Southern belle, a black drag queen, an antiques dealer, a piano-playing con artist, young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball, and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight.

Georgia

Susan has a suggestion for Georgia: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Sounds good to me!

Everyone associates this book with Georgia and the city of Atlanta. The plantation of Tara is south of Atlanta, in the area of Jonesboro, which today has a Tara Boulevard.