If it is not too late to change this evening’s (January 20) plans, Amy Greene is reading from Bloodroot at 7:00 p.m. at the Georgia Center for the Book, Decatur Public Library located at 215 Sycamore Street, Decatur, GA 30030. If tomorrow is more convenient, read on. And if two new books that take place in the South are of interest, and they should be, keep moving your eyes down the page.
William Zinsser wrote in what is the best book about writing, On Writing Well, that one should write as they speak. This is brilliant advice, and one of the best writer’s tools. Readers will be more than lucky if this is the case with two outstanding authors, Beth Hoffman and Amy Greene, who are both reading from their debut novels in Atlanta on Thursday, January 21, 2010. The events are free and open to the public.
Amy Greene is scheduled for a reading from Bloodroot at the Fox Tale Book Shoppe at 7:00 p.m. Visit the store’s website for address, directions and contact information.
Ms. Greene’s sumptuous prose brings to life the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, her home territory, and where she lives today. She handles the dialect of her characters without condescension and ensures that it does not slow the pace of the story.
Beth Hoffman will be reading from Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt at The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House. Visit the website for address, directions and contact information. A writer who begins the autobiographical section of her website with, “I was born in an elevator during a snow storm,” sets the reader up for a deeply soul-satisfying read. Ms. Hoffman penned characters so real life that they could be one’s next-door neighbors, particularly if one lives in the South. Her depiction of Savannah is unlike most proffered in novels, gone is the heavy drinking, old boys club society that is closed to all who haven’t grown up in the city.
Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt is the story of the women in Savannah. The name and the pretty as a debutante book jacket belie the intensity of the novel. There are several levels a reader may approach this tale by. First as a hopeful novel where the heroine overcomes adversity, secondly as an in depth exploration of humanity. The good, and evil and how to survive in this world or thirdly as a story of hereditary mental illness. Either way, it is a novel that beckons the reader in and wraps its arms around one until the last sentence, leaving one wistful for Ms. Hoffman’s next novel.
Look out for expanded reviews of these two superb reads from the Atlanta Literature Examiner in the next week.
Bloodroot
By Amy Greene
Knopf
ISBN 978-0-307-26986-7
Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking
ISBN 978-0-670-02139-0
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