The Sunday Salon and 3 Great Reads with a Southern touch

Welcome to Chick with Books, The Sunday Salon and The Sunday Post (which is hosted by Kim at The Caffeinated Book Reviewer)!  It's the day of the week we sit back, relax and talk books! The new year has started and as a reader I am so excited to see what books are coming our way! So, pull up a chair, grab a cup of Java and let's explore some great reading!

It's the winter in Connecticut, but the temps are in the 50's! Today was like a beautiful spring day with sunshine and 57 degrees! Instead of reading dreary winter fiction, it felt like I should be reading beach reads. What I started to read and could hardly stop reading (and I really needed to if I was going to post a Sunday Salon!) was the night the lights went out by Karen White. This is the first time I've read anything by Karen White and I'm beginning to fall in love. Her writing is so unassuming and before I knew it I was absorbed in the story, these women, and read 25% on my Kindle. This book reminded me of another book I enjoyed a long time ago called The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen. In fact it was a reading group selection. Another great story with Southern roots... So that got me to thinking about another book I read that I also really enjoyed called Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson. I actually listened to the audiobook and loved it. So, today I'm offering up some great stories with a little touch of Southern and a great female protagonist to show you around the pages...

the night the lights went out by Karen White... a young single mother who discovers that the nature of friendship is never what it seems....

Recently divorced, Merilee Talbot Dunlap moves with her two children to the Atlanta suburb of Sweet Apple, Georgia. It’s not her first time starting over, but her efforts at a new beginning aren’t helped by an anonymous local blog that dishes about the scandalous events that caused her marriage to fail. Merilee finds some measure of peace in the cottage she is renting from town matriarch Sugar Prescott. Though stubborn and irascible, Sugar sees something of herself in Merilee—something that allows her to open up about her own colorful past. Sugar’s stories give Merilee a different perspective on the town and its wealthy school moms in their tennis whites and shiny SUVs, and even on her new friendship with Heather Blackford. Merilee is charmed by the glamorous young mother’s seemingly perfect life and finds herself drawn into Heather's world. In a town like Sweet Apple, where sins and secrets are as likely to be found behind the walls of gated mansions as in the dark woods surrounding Merilee’s house, appearance is everything. But just how dangerous that deception can be will shock all three women....

Write this down... Release date is April 11, 2017! Published by Berkley. I just received an eGalley of this and really could not put it down. Now I'm only 25% through it, but I think it's going to be even better as I turn the pages. It's gotten a lot of pre-publishing praise.


The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen... It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather and once the finest home in Walls of Water, North Carolina—has stood for years as a monument to misfortune and scandal. Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite Paxton Osgood—has restored the house to its former glory, with plans to turn it into a top-flight inn. But when a skeleton is found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, long-kept secrets come to light, accompanied by a spate of strange occurrences throughout the town. Thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the passions and betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover the truths that have transcended time to touch the hearts of the living. 

Published by Random House (Bantam reprint) in 2011. We love Willa! Really good story, great characters, a sprinkling of magic, and I really enjoyed this! I would definitely recommend this to women fiction readers.

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson... Rose Mae Lolley's mother disappeared when she was eight, leaving Rose with a heap of old novels and a taste for dangerous men. Now, as demure Mrs. Ro Grandee, she's living the very life her mother abandoned. She's all but forgotten the girl she used to be-teenaged spitfire, Alabama heartbreaker, and a crack shot with a pistol-until an airport gypsy warns Rose it's time to find her way back to that brave, tough girl . . . or else. Armed with only her wit, her pawpy's ancient .45, and her dog Fat Gretel, Rose Mae hightails it out of Texas, running from a man who will never let her go, on a mission to find the mother who did. 

Starring a minor character from Jackson's bestselling gods in Alabama, BACKSEAT SAINTS will dazzle readers with its stunning portrayal of the measures a mother will take to right the wrongs she's created, and how far a daughter will travel to satisfy the demands of forgiveness

Published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011. You will be rooting for Rose Mae! Another great story and more good characters.

That about covers today's reading pile! Sometimes it's not always a new book I want to recommend, but a book I really enjoyed a long time ago that deserves a new audience, and that's what today is mostly about. I will have to check out other books by Karen White though... and both Sarah Addison Allen and Joshilyn Jackson have some other good books too!

Hope you found something interesting to read here today! In the meantime...

Happy reading... Suzanne