On Agate Hill

July 31, 2006
Following her 2001 Southern Book Critics Circle award–winning novel, The Last Girls
, Smith's 10th novel chronicles the post–Civil War life of a precocious Southern orphan using a slapdash patchwork of journal entries, letters, poems, recipes, songs, catechism and court records. Molly Petree, the daughter of a slain Confederate soldier, begins a diary on her 13th birthday in May 1872, near Hillsborough, N.C., at Agate Hill, the plantation of her legal guardian, Uncle Junius Hall. Seeing herself as "a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house," Molly falls under the spiteful devices of Selena, the scheming housekeeper, who marries a terminally ill Junius to inherit the plantation. Under Selena's watch, Molly is neglected, mistreated and raped before Simon Black, who fought alongside Molly's father, rescues her and enrolls her in the Gatewood Academy, where she becomes "an educated, fancy woman." After graduating, Molly marries sweet-talking Jacky, but tragedy dogs her: Jacky dies a particularly miserable death, their baby dies and when Molly returns to Agate Hill, she finds it in ruins. Molly's story is moving, but Smith's structure—the narrative's pieces are the contents of "a box of old stuff" found during Agate Hill's renovation—is needlessly contrived.

September 1, 2006
Former beauty queen Tuscany Miller gave up her dissertation on -Beauty Shop Culture in the South: Big Hair and Community - to get married. When her disastrous marriage ends, Tuscany discovers a young girl's diary in the attic of her father's bed-and-breakfast, a rundown postbellum plantation called Agate Hill. Tuscany's letters to her former doctoral advisor alternate with entries from this diary, kept by young Molly Petree, a Civil War orphan in North Carolina driven from her home, Agate Hill, by the Yankees and handed 'round from relatives to finishing schools until her 18th year. Molly's own diary and the diaries of her teachers and friends form a patchwork quilt of Molly's life from birth to death. Placed in Gatewood Academy by a benefactor, headstrong, beautiful, and independent Molly wins the affection of her fellow pupils and scorns the hypocrisy of the founders of the academy. Upon graduation, she heads for a mountain school and falls in love with a fun-loving, guitar-picking holler man until mysterious circumstances end the relationship. In the end, Molly returns to Agate Hill to live out her life surrounded by memories. Smith has worked her magic yet again; her rollicking humor, keen sense of place, deft characterizations, and raucous storytelling bring to life yet another set of memorable people and places. Highly recommended." -Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2006
This ever-popular novelist, author of, most recently, " The Last Girls"(2002), now turns to an increasingly popular genre, historical fiction, and does so with a bang. The time period that Lee knowledgably sets this involving novel within encompasses the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century; her setting is North Carolina. The novel's conceit is not particularly original--it is purportedly composed of real documents, such as diary entries, letters, and court documents--but Lee nevertheless fashions, in gradual steps through time and from the telling perspectives of different individuals, the riveting character Molly Petree. She is an orphan at war's end, dependent on being taken in by family, but she isn't the type to stay at the mercy of anyone. Her pluck, fortitude, resilience, and wisdom prompt her not only to take things as they come during this disorderly time in the South but also to dictate her own fortune and make a life in which she can find some peace. This novel of treachery and resolution provides an intimate picture of the Reconstruction era, observed through the lens not of politicians and generals but of the common folk upon whose shoulders the actual reconstruction of a ravaged land rested.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)