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It's been almost 10 years since we followed Susan Hayes and her rebellious teenage daughter, Beth, as she fled a cheating husband and retreated to the family home on Sullivans Island.
It was Dorothea Benton Frank's first novel, and she poured into it all her memories of a Lowcountry childhood of a generation ago.
Now it is four years later; Beth has earned a degree from Boston College and has come back to South Carolina with a chip on her shoulder. Her mother has asked her to house-sit for a year while she takes a teaching job in Paris, and Beth sees it as a year lost from her life. Her touchiness leads to quarrels with most of her relatives, but eventually she sees off her mother and settles down to make the best of it.
For Beth, the best is ridiculously easy. She makes friends with the daughter of an old family retainer, gets two part-time jobs at the first two places she applies, and meets the man of her dreams. But all dreams do not come true. Before it is over Beth has suffered heartbreak, faces financial disaster and family tragedy, and even has to deal with the ghosts that haunt her ancestral home.
Frank has written nine more best-selling novels since her debut, most of them set in the Charleston area ("Pawleys Island," "Shem Creek," "Isle of Palms") but I'm afraid she hasn't conquered her tendency toward a cliched, overwritten and predictable story.
At the end of my original 2000 review in The Island Packet, I warned readers "don't expect too much." I'm afraid that admonition still holds true.
'Reefer Moon'
Roger Pinckney was born and bred in the S.C. Lowcountry, so when he writes a novel about this part of the world, you can be sure you're getting the right stuff. This one involves the illegal drug business, but it is also a close-in look at Daufuskie Island, where he lives.
His characters are a varied and often scroungy lot, interested in booze, pot, sex and hustling a living, usually without the approval of the law.
Poogey Drake is trying to sell building lots before his Yankee clients discover that Daufuskie is never going to be Hilton Head Island.
Susan is his sexy and neglected wife, who does not have to look far for companionship. Yancey Yarboro is a tomato farmer whose main interest is chasing after whiskey or women, one of whom is Susan Drake.
Christy Seabrook is the black sheep son of a distinguished old Beaufort family who makes his living in the drug trade, and Mike McElvern is an Irish shrimp boat skipper who can be easily talked into helping out Christy. And Gator Brown is an old Gullah "the color of pecans" who knows all about conjuring and root doctors and goofer dust ("dirt off a dead man grabe"), and will help out a white man he trusts. He trusts Yancey.
There isn't much of a plot, but it doesn't really matter. The appeal of this funny, fast-moving story is in the raunchy picture it gives you of what really goes on there -- not one you'll get from the chamber of commerce or anywhere else.
Pinckney can trace his family back to a provost marshal sent here in the 1760s by King George III. His father "was the doctor over here when I was a child," he says. "I've always loved the place, and now it's my home." Fortunately, that doesn't inhibit him from revealing the high -- and low -- life on an island we don't know nearly as well as we think we do.
