Staff Picks
Reading in a Southerly Direction Spring & Summer 2017
- Chantal W.
- Thursday, June 22, 2017
Collection
Are you looking for novels or works of nonfiction that feature Southern locales, use the South as a touchstone, or are written by Southern authors (native or transplanted)? Then check out some of these tites...and read in a Southerly direction.
Also, if you are participating in our #BroaderBookshelf challenge, one of the prompts is to read a book set in the Carolinas. There are some in this list.
Yes, Lord, I Know the Road
A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526-2008
Published in 2017
Counting Down Southern Rock
The 100 Best Songs
Published in 2016
"In Counting Down Southern Rock: The 100 Best Songs, C. Eric Banister considers the best songs to emerge from the bands who made Southern rock what it is. Banister examines the impact of the songs on the society and culture of devoted fans and delves deep into the history and production of each song. Featuring such well-known bands as the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as less visible groups like Blackhorse and Heartsfield, this book is the perfect introduction for both newbies and dedicated fans,"--Amazon.com.
Best. State. Ever.
A Florida Man Defends His Homeland
Published in 2016
Sure, there was the 2000 election and flying insects the size of LeBron James. But Barry is going to show you why Florida is a great state. And whatever else you think about Florida-- you can never say it's boring.
Lucky Strikes
Published in 2016
"Set in Depression Era Virginia, this is the story of orphaned Amelia and her struggle to keep her siblings together"-- Provided by publisher.
Rise
How a House Built a Family
Published in 2017
"After escaping an abusive marriage, Cara Brookins had four children to provide for and no one to turn to but herself. In desperate need of a home but without the means to buy one, she did something incredible. Equipped only with YouTube instructional videos, a small bank loan and a mile-wide stubborn streak, Cara built her own house from the foundation up with a work crew made up of her four children. It would be the hardest thing she had ever done. With no experience nailing together anything bigger than a bookshelf, she and her kids poured concrete, framed the walls and laid bricks for their two story, five bedroom house. She had convinced herself that if they could build a house, they could rebuild their broken family" -- provided by publisher.
The River of Kings
A Novel
Published in 2017
"The Altamaha River, Georgia's "Little Amazon," has been named one of the 75 "Last Great Places in the World." Crossed by roads only five times in its 137-mile length, the blackwater river is home to thousand-year-old virgin cypress, descendants of 18th-century Highland warriors, and a motley cast of rare and endangered species. The Altamaha has even been rumored to harbor its own river monster, as well as traces of the most ancient European fort in North America. Brothers Hunter and Lawton Loggins set off to kayak the river, bearing their father's ashes toward the sea. Hunter is a college student, Lawton a Navy SEAL on leave; both young men were raised by an angry, enigmatic shrimper who loved the river, and whose death remains a mystery that his sons hope to resolve. As the brothers proceed downriver, their story is interwoven with that of Jacques Le Moyne, an artist who accompanied the 1564 expedition to found a French settlement at the river's mouth, which began as a search for riches and ended in a bloody confrontation with Spanish conquistadors and native tribes. In The River of Kings, SIBA-bestselling author Taylor Brown artfully weaves three narrative strands--the brothers' journey, their father's past, and the dramatic history of the river's earliest people--to evoke a legendary place and its powerful hold on the human imagination"-- Provided by publisher.
Because You're Mine
Published in 2017
"Alanna has been plagued by tragedy. So it should come as no surprise that in the beauty that surrounds Charleston, all is not as it seems. When her husband is killed by a car bomb while their band is on tour in Charleston, Alanna doesn't know where to turn. Her father-in-law is threatening to take custody of the baby she carries, but the one thing she knows for sure is that she can't lose the last piece of Liam she has left. Their manager offers her a marriage of convenience to gain her U.S. citizenship and allow her to escape her father-in-law's control. It seems like the perfect solution. but her doubts begin almost as soon as she arrives at Barry's family home, a decaying mansion surrounded by swamp. To make matters worse, Liam's best friend survived the car bomb. She's never really liked Jesse and now she can't seem to get away from him. When he takes Liam's place in their band, it's almost more than she can bear. But then things start happening. Things that could easily cost Alanna her life--or the life of her unborn child. Are they merely coincidences? Or is there something much more sinister at work?"-- Provided by publisher.
The Potlikker Papers
A Food History of the Modern South
Published in 2017
"A people's history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades"--Amazon.com.
The South in Color
A Visual Journal
Published in 2016
Since the moment William Ferris's parents gave their twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The sixties and seventies were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative collection of one hundred of Ferris's photographs of the South, taken during this formative period, capture the power of his color photography. Color film, as Ferris points out in the book's introduction, was not commonly used by documentarians during the latter half of the twentieth century, but Ferris found color to work in significant ways in the photographic journals he created of his world in all its permutations and surprises.
Signals
Published in 2017
"A widely celebrated novelist gives us a generous collection of exhilarating short stories, proving that he is a master of this genre as well. Once again, "he reminds us," wrote The Miami Herald, "that great writing is a timeless art." After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities--a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what's right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction"-- Provided by publisher.
Grief Cottage
A Novel
Published in 2017
After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation.The islanders call it "Grief Cottage," because a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane fifty years before. Their bodies were never found and the cottage has stood empty ever since. During his lonely hours while Aunt Charlotte is in her studio painting and keeping her demons at bay, Marcus visits the cottage daily, building up his courage by coming ever closer, even after the ghost of the boy who died seems to reveal himself. Full of curiosity and open to the unfamiliar and uncanny given the recent upending of his life, he courts the ghost boy, never certain whether the ghost is friendly or follows some sinister agenda.Grief Cottage is the best sort of ghost story, but it is far more than that--an investigation of grief, remorse, and the memories that haunt us. The power and beauty of this artful novel wash over the reader like the waves on a South Carolina beach.
Walking on My Grave
Published in 2017
"Annie's friend and fellow shop owner Ves Roundtree is a very wealthy woman. Her rich brother entrusted her with his estate, and upon her death, his fortune is to be divided. Several cash-strapped islanders are in line to collect life-changing inheritances. The problem is, Ves is very much alive. Ves hosts a dinner for the prospective beneficiaries and feels a chill in the air that has nothing to do with the wintry season. Not long after, she suffers a bad fall that was no accident. Everyone at the table had a motive but not a shred of evidence was left behind. When one of the suspects is found floating in the harbor and Ves disappears, Annie and her husband Max spring into action to catch a calculating killer before greed takes another life."
The Book of Polly
Published in 2017
"The laugh-out-loud story of a girl determined to keep up with her aging, crazy-as-a-fox mother and learn the truth of her mother's long-secret past...Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors--and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young, modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late fifties when Willow was born, so Willow knows she's here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow's father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere: it's just her and bigger-than-life Polly. Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and especially Polly's life pre-Willow. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, fifty years ago and vow never to return? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun The Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her past?"-- Provided by publisher.
Deep Run Roots
Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South
Published in 2016
"Vivian Howard, the star cocreator of PBS's A CHEF'S LIFE, celebrates the flavors of North Carolina's coastal plain in more than 200 recipes and stories,"--Amazon.com.
The Almost Sisters
Published in 2017
"With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality--the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are. Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs' weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She's having a baby boy--an unexpected but not unhappy development in the thirty-eight year-old's life. But before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel's marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she's been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend since girlhood. Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother's affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and tell her family that she's pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she's got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie's been hiding. Tucked in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family's freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows"-- Provided by publisher.
The Weight of This World
Published in 2017
"Critically acclaimed author David Joy, whose debut, Where All Light Tends to Go, was hailed as "a savagely moving novel that will likely become an important addition to the great body of Southern literature" (The Huffington Post), returns to the mountains of North Carolina with a powerful story about the inescapable weight of the past. A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it"-- Provided by publisher.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy
Published in 2017
"The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, she was an avowed feminist--a graduate student determined to pursue her own career--when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for fifteen years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela's election. Coretta's is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life."--Provided by publisher.
Eveningland
Stories
Published in 2017
""Michael Knight is more than a master of the short story. He knows the true pace of life and does not cheat it, all the while offering whopping entertainment."-Barry Hannah Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight's stories have been lauded by writers such Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Barry Hannah, and Richard Bausch. Now, with Eveningland he returns to the form that launched his career, delivering an arresting collection of interlinked stories set among the "right kind of Mobile family" in the years preceding a devastating hurricane. Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the "unspeakable misgivings of contentment," Eveningland captures with crystalline poeticism and perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity. A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year's Eve; a middle aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters. These stories, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward. Eveningland is a luminous collection from "a writer of the first rank."(Esquire)"-- Provided by publisher.
Mercies in Disguise
A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and the Science That Rescued Them
Published in 2017
The phone rings: the doctor has the results. "Are you ready Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested. But she had to find out. If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold a brutal illness and you were offered the chance to find out if you'd inherited it, would you do it? Would you walk toward the problem, bravely accepting whatever answer came your way? Or would you avoid the potential bad news as long as possible? In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed science journalist and bestselling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in a small town in South Carolina. Some family members were doctors; still, they are baffled by an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events that many saw as providential. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution--not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma--fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process. Mercies in Disguise tells the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It's a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman--Amanda Baxley--who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family's destiny.-- Provided by publisher.
The Lynching
The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan
Published in 2016
Describes the brutal killing of a young black man and subsequent conviction of two Klansmen in 1981 Alabama and the civil suit that exposed the true motives and philosophy of the organization and ultimately bankrupted them.
The Barrowfields
A Novel
Published in 2017
"The Barrowfields is a richly textured coming of age story about a boy who loses the larger-than-life lawyer/writer father that he grew up idolizing, subsequently leaves home in the NC mountains and spends years contending with forgiveness, falls in love, and finally returns" -- Provided by publisher.
Be Free or Die
The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero
Published in 2017
Truevine
Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest
Published in 2016
Beth Macy, master chronicler of life in the South, combines exhaustive research, exclusive interviews and sources, and attention to detail in this riveting American story about race, greed, and a mother's love. George and Willie Muse from Truevine, Virginia were two little boys born in a brutal time, sharecropping a field in the segregated South, stolen away by a white man offering candy, and set on a path of events that would forever change their lives--and their family's destiny. -- adapted from dust jacket.
Always Happy Hour
Stories
Published in 2017
"Acerbic and ruefully funny, [this book] weaves tales of young women-- deeply flawed and intensely real-- who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools, and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own baggage-- whether it's a string of horrible exes, a boyfriend with an annoying child, or an inability to be genuinely happy for a best friend-- they are united in their unrelenting suspicion that they deserve better. These women seek understanding in the most unlikely places: a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability in "Big Bad Love," a trailer park littered with a string of bad decisions in "Uphill," and the unfamiliar corners of a dream home purchased with the winnings of a bitter divorce settlement in "Charts." Taking a microscope to delicate patterns of love and intimacy, Miller evokes the reticent love among the misunderstood, the gritty comfort in bad habits that can't be broken, and the beat-by-beat minutiae of fated relationships."--Amazon.com
Beach House for Rent
Published in 2017
"Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of the Lowcountry Summer series, returns to her beloved Beach House series with the highly anticipated follow-up to Beach House Memories and The Beach House!"-- Provided by publisher.
Between Two Skies
Published in 2017
Bayou Perdu, a tiny fishing town way, way down in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, is home to sixteen-year-old Evangeline Riley. She has her best friends, Kendra and Danielle; wise, beloved Mamere; and back-to-back titles in the under-sixteen fishing rodeo. But, dearest to her heart, she has the peace that comes only when she takes her skiff out to where there is nothing but sky and air and water and wings. It's a small life, but it is Evangeline's. And then the storm comes. And everything changes. Amid the chaos and pain and destruction comes Tru--a fellow refugee, a budding bluesman, a balm for Evangeline's aching heart. This novel asks compelling questions about class and politics, exile and belonging, and the pain of being cast out of your home. But, perhaps above all, this is a gently woven love story, difficult to put down, impossible to forget.-- from dust jacket.
Small Treasons
A Novel
Published in 2017
"Tess Maynard's life is coming apart. At home with her three young children in her husband's small north Georgia hometown, she is steadily becoming obsessed with an American journalist captured in Syria and being held by ISIS, sensing an eerie resonance between his captivity and her own. Meanwhile, the life of her husband is also beginning to unravel. John Maynard is a psychologist working as a college counselor. But in a former life-a life that becomes his obsession-he worked as a government contractor at a CIA black site in Eastern Europe where suspected terrorists, and one innocent civilian, were tortured. Now the Justice Department is threatening an investigation, but not if John will cooperate in an ongoing operation: a professor at the college where he works is rumored to be involved with an organization masking a militant group. As John and Tess work to salvage their life together a young man in Atlanta is slowly becoming radicalized-groomed by the professor John is meant to report on-to fight not in Syria but at home in the US. Eventually all three lives intersect, with devastating consequences"-- Provided by publisher.
Loving Vs. Virginia
A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case
Published in 2017
Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.
Among the Living
Published in 2016
"A moving novel about a Holocaust survivor's unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia. In late summer 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives--distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak's past suddenly appears--one who is even more shattered than he is--Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life. Set amid the backdrop of America's postwar south, Among the Living grapples with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish experience as it situates Yitzhak's story during the last gasp of the Jim Crow era. Yitzhak begins to find echoes of his own experience in the lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers--an affinity he does not share with the Jeslers themselves. This realization both surprises and convinces Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might have thought"-- Provided by publisher.
The Second Mrs. Hockaday
A Novel
Published in 2017
"When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?"-- Provided by publisher.
Ginny Gall
A Life in the South
Published in 2016
"Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written word, and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them near daily, and after a series of devastating events--a lynching, a church burning--Delvin fears being accused of murdering a local white boy and leaves town"--Jacket flap.
Add a Pinch
Easier, Faster, Fresher Southern Classics
Published in 2017
Collects traditional Southern recipes from the blogger behind the popular Add a Pinch website that have been reworked to be faster and healthier, including such dishes as buttermilk fried chicken, blackened catfish, and Creole shrimp and grits.
Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Published in 2016
Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.
Extraordinary Adventures
A Novel
Published in 2017
"A large-hearted and optimistic novel, Extraordinary Adventures is the latest from the New York Times bestselling Daniel Wallace. Edsel Bronfman works as a junior executive shipping clerk for an importer of Korean flatware. He lives in a seedy neighborhood and spends his free time with his spirited mother. Things happen to other people, and Bronfman knows it. Until, that is, he gets a call from operator 61217 telling him that he's won a free weekend at a beachfront condo in Destin, Florida. But there's a catch: the offer is intended for a couple, and Bronfman has only seventy-nine days to find someone to take with him. The phone call jolts Bronfman into motion, initiating a series of truly extraordinary adventures as he sets out to find a companion for his weekend getaway. Open at last to the possibilities of life, Bronfman now believes that anything can happen. And it does"-- Provided by publisher.
The Guests on South Battery
Published in 2017
"New York Times bestselling author Karen White invites you to explore the brick-walked streets of Charleston, where historic mansions house the memories of years gone by and restless spirits refuse to fade away.... With her extended maternity leave at its end, Melanie Trenholm is less than thrilled to leave her new husband and beautiful twins to return to work, especially when she's awakened by a phone call with no voice on the other end--and the uneasy feeling that the ghostly apparitions that have stayed silent for more than a year are about to invade her life once more. But her return to the realty office goes better than she could have hoped, with a new client eager to sell the home she recently inherited on South Battery. Most would treasure living in one of the grandest old homes in the famous historic district of Charleston, but Jayne Smith would rather sell it as soon as possible, guaranteeing Melanie a quick commission. Despite her stroke of luck, Melanie can't deny that spirits--both malevolent and benign--have started to appear to her again. One is shrouded from sight, appearing whenever Jayne is near. Another arrives when an old cistern is discovered in her backyard on Tradd Street. Melanie knows nothing good can come from unearthing the past. But some secrets refuse to stay buried..."-- Provided by publisher.
Slightly South of Simple
Published in 2017
Caroline Murphy swore she'd never set foot back in the small Southern town of Peachtree Bluff; she was a New York girl born and bred and the worst day of her life was when, in the wake of her father's death, her mother selfishly forced her to move--during her senior year of high school, no less--back to that hick-infested rat trap where she'd spent her childhood summers. But now that her marriage to a New York high society heir has fallen apart in a very public, very embarrassing fashion, a pregnant Caroline decides to escape the gossipmongers with her nine-year-old daughter and head home to her mother, Ansley. Ansley has always put her three daughters first, especially when she found out that her late husband, despite what he had always promised, left her with next to nothing. Now the proud owner of a charming waterfront design business and finally standing on her own two feet, Ansley welcomes Caroline and her brood back with open arms. But when her second daughter Sloane, whose military husband is overseas, and youngest daughter and successful actress Emerson join the fray, Ansley begins to feel like the piece of herself she had finally found might be slipping from her grasp. Even more discomfiting, when someone from her past reappears in Ansley's life, the secret she's harbored from her daughters their entire lives might finally be forced into the open.