Georgia Bottoms

Debra Monk's hint of sarcasm colors her straightforward reading just as the character of Georgia Bottoms spices up the lives of the staid citizens of her small Alabama town. In her mid-thirties, the single belle brings in an income and maintains a stable home for her mother, who has dementia, and her brother, an AA member who visits bars as regularly as meetings. Monk's reading conveys conventional characters who provide contrast for Georgia's fiery inner commentary and feisty dialogues. Georgia juggles six affairs with the power players in town while planning a pretentious party for the female elite. The story's irony sharpens when that luncheon, scheduled for 9/11, ignites political and personal challenges. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 13, 2010
Sassy Southern belle Georgia has a lot of secrets: a rotation of gentleman callers with unique sexual needs, a mother with a tenuous hold on reality, and a lucrative (if dodgy) business of selling at a huge mark-up the folk art quilts she buys and passes off as her own creations. But then 9/11 comes along, Georgia's world of naughty innocence is changed forever, and all the plates she once spun so effortlessly in midair come crashing down: her illegitimate black son shows up on her doorstep; her best friend and town mayor, Krystal, loses her job; her demented mom and drunken brother become increasingly errant; and one of her boyfriends—a spiteful preacher—has an unfortunate attack of conscience and intends to publicly confess his affair and simultaneously condemn poor Georgia to hell. Childress (One Mississippi) is sassy magnolia lit's Truman Capote—sharply observant, unrelentingly honest, and downright hilarious—and his Georgia peach is the freshest bad girl to rise from the South since Scarlett O'Hara.