The Southern Belles of Honeysuckle Way

Hailed as a worthy successor to Fannie Flagg” (New York Post), nationally bestselling author Linda Bruckheimer follows up her acclaimed debut with a novel that brings back the irrepressible southern Wootens.The Dallas Morning Newshailed Dreaming Southern, Linda Bruckheimer’s first novel, as comic…fast-paced…Vividly recreates America in the 1950s.” The Los Angeles Timescrowned it zany,” and Marie Clairemagazine dubbed it ”a comic odyssey guaranteed to induce grins.”Sisters Rebecca and Carleen, along with their daughters, are headed for Blue Lick Springs, Kentucky, where they are looking forward to reuniting with their baby sister Irene for their mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. But what begins as a road trip is really a journey of the heart for each sister as they put the pieces of their lives together before the big celebration. Rebecca decides to save Blue Lick Springs single-handedly from ruthless real estate developers bent on razing beloved landmarks to make way for parking lots. Carleen’s hoping to right the world’s wrongs with her weekly pet peeve column, but when an attractive McDonald’s executive becomes her subject matter, she finds herself reevaluating her marriage. Encouraged by Lila Mae, Irene moves back to Kentucky to live with her ninety-five-year-old grandmother. Rather than getting away from it all, she ends up hiding in the bushes of a trailer park as she investigates an insurance scheme. And their feisty mother, Lila Mae, may still have a surprise or two in store for her lively progeny.

Linda Bruckheimer is the author of the national bestseller Dreaming Southern. Ms. Bruckheimer divides her time between a farm in rural Kentucky and Los Angeles, California, where she lives with her husband, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Prologue Rebecca Somewhere Out in the Wild Black Yonder AUGUST 1999 It is way beyond midnight, an oven-hot August evening, and I am drifting along a strand of Louisiana asphalt that I canit quite locate on any map. The wisp of a road bounces across an alligator-infested swamp, and the air is thick with the stench of stagnant water. Fluttering before the windshield like poison jewels and disappearing into the bayou are glowing, snapping insects. Several miles behind me was the last vestige of civilizationoa weathered gothic church with a sign saying: FREE TRIP TO HEAVENoDETAILS INSIDE.The skyscape around me, though, is cloaked in summer finery: The Big Dipperis silver stars twinkle above the oak trees. A huge Japanese lantern of a moon illuminates the night. And thereis the Milky Way, trailing across the sky in misty, billowy tufts like miles and miles of bridal veil. An ordinary motorist would admit they were lost, or at the very least, misplaced or off-kilter. Lila Mae, my wayfaring mother and a utopian traveler, would simply call the situation ithe scenic route.i It is true that I donit know where I am at the moment. It is even, as an old song put it, a little worse than that: iI donit know where Iive come from, icause I donit know where Iive been.i Or so the lyrics go. If the accounts Iive heard from gas station attendants and tollbooth operators are to be believed, it is not an opportune time to be drifting. Percolating somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico is a hurricane, one thatis threatening to sweep ashore. Because of this, my nerves are drawn tight as the strings of a Stradivarius. But, there is magic in the night, and I am infused with excitement, as if the wings of some exotic bird were flapping inside me. Sprinkled like melting snowflakes along this lonely trail and causing me to pause every few miles or so are the remains of Louisiana plantations, their Corinthian columns rotten, and the majestic allEes of old, mere petrified soldiers of twisted bark. In the age-old grapple between purity and evil, their limbs climb upward as if reaching for the heavens, while their long arthritic roots burrow deep into the clay earth. Corroded iron gates lean in the wind; bits of their broken curlicues are hidden in the tall grass like Easter eggs. I am both fascinated and repelled by this region, the Old South in its glory days of magnolia blossoms and bloodstained ground, where soiled Confederate gray and the boom of cannons still pierce the night. If I close my eyes, from some ancient crevice comes the tinkle of banjo music and the crackling of burning sugar cane and the rat-a-tat-tatof a thousand dancing belles. Decades before, I wandered through similar fields and picked pearls of cotton, which I tucked into the pocket of my pink toreador pants, a trinket of my home turf to keep my dreams squirming with life. Perhaps these mansions, these ash ghosts that rattle the cages of my memory, are the exact houses that caught my girlish fancy as I wished on stars and conjured images of the perfect future. Officially, this current adventure is nothing more than a means to an end. My younger sister, Carleen, and I are on our way to Kentucky from California, where we will join Irene, our Baby Sister, Miss Olive, our grandmother; plus dozens of friends and relatives to celebrate Lila Maeis seventy-fifth birthday. Unlike the others who have chosen the lickety-split friendly skies, we have opted to leave a few weeks early, wending our way across the American landscape in a carothe scenic route, if you willothe exact route (if such an absurd thing is even possible) that Lila Mae, our discombobulated mother, and her four young children took several decades ago when our family set out for California on Route 66. The object of our desire is a glimpse of the good old days, before progress and the bulldozer ambushed our heritage. Simple as this t