Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.
Just grab your book and share the opening lines; then find another excerpt that “teases” the reader.
Today’s featured book is Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch, by Haywood Smith.
Linwood Breedlove Scott’s life has officially hit rock bottom. Her husband of thirty years has run off with a stripper. The IRS has taken everything but her coffee table. And her hot flashes are four-alarmers. The only thing that could make being flat-broke and fifty any worse is having to crawl home to her parents’ house in Mimosa Branch, Georgia…which is exactly where she’s headed.
Lin’s barely prepared for the loony bin that greets her, from her controlling, eighty-year-old mother and shockingly blunt father to her long-suffering Aunt Glory and her deranged Uncle Bedford who is convinced a cannibal lives under the furniture. Nor is she ready for the instant love-hate attraction she feels for her handsome new next-door neighbor. Trying to navigate her way through the second act of her life with nothing more than a prepaid calling card, a broken heart, and plenty of Prozac, Lin’s about to discover that it’s never too late for old friends, new romance, the ties of family, and a second chance to survive it all on the road to becoming the person you were always meant to be…
***
Beginning: I took the long way home that fateful midsummer day last July, maybe because I still couldn’t quite believe what I was about to do.
I could still hear Miss Mamie—that’s my mother; everybody calls her Miss Mamie, including my brother and me—telling me, on the eve of my wedding, that if I insisted on marrying Phil at nineteen, I shouldn’t even think of turning up on her doorstep again. “You make your bed, you lie in it,” she’d said with absolute conviction. (Miss Mamie says everything with absolute conviction).
Yet here I was thirty years later, galled to my very soul that my family’s dire predictions for my marriage had finally proven true. The phantom umbilicus that connected me to my mother had turned out to be a cosmic bungee cord, my fifty years of life one long, ludicrous leap that was rebounding at light-speed back to the womb. God help me.
So that Thursday, the day after the Fourth of July, I took the slow, scenic route through Mimosa Branch. Driving into the old business district, I was struck that my hometown seemed to have come up in the world at least as far as I had come down. Everything was fixed up, filled up, and decidedly suburban upscale, right down to the contemporary artists’ warren in one of the old mill buildings.
***
Teaser: I lifted my glass. “Here’s to celibacy.” Then I did as Geneva suggested and got good and snockered—on only two drinks.
***
So what’s the verdict? Is this a book you’d keep reading? I hope you’ll come by and share your own snippets.
