Folly Beach

June 27, 2011
Frank's latest novel displays a rare talent that fans will welcome. Cate's philandering husband has died, leaving her nothing, and the entire contents of her sizable home have been repossessed. She returns to her relatives in Charleston hoping to get a grip on what has happened and on what comes next. Cate's new life with her firecracker of an aunt in the South is told primarily through hilarious and engaging dialogue with family and friends, with a smattering of seriousness along the way. The recently widowed protagonist's journey to rediscovering joy and love will thrill readers, especially with the addition of a suavely integrated story-within-a-story involving a one-woman play about the lovers who wrote Porgy and Bess. There's a certain authenticity to the lives Frank tells that will resonate with many women. Frank's telling of this tale will help readers celebrate love and sexuality after 60.

January 1, 2011

Cate enjoyed South Carolina's Folly Beach as a child, but when she returns as an adult she's not just widowed but broke--her faithless husband wrecked their finances. Still, she slowly opens herself to the possibilities. The one-day laydown on June 14 and 250,000-copy first printing attest to the ongoing popularity of Frank's Lowcountry titles, and the ten-city tour will help. Buy multiples wherever Frank is popular.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011

A widow returns to her childhood haven, Folly Beach, S.C., where she is captivated by new love and a literary mystery.

In this latest of Frank's Lowcountry series set on South Carolina's picturesque barrier islands, the heroine, Cate, is another victim of the economic crash of 2008. When she discovers her equity-trader husband, Addison, hanging over her piano in their New Jersey mansion, she only has an inkling of the financial shenanigans that led to his suicide. Within 24 hours, mistresses, paternity claims and collection liens are popping up like dandelions, and Cate watches in horror as all her worldly goods are repossessed. Flat broke (even her engagement bling is a zircon!), she has no alternative but to flee to the South Carolina home of her Aunt Daisy, who raised Cate and sister Patti after they were orphaned as children. Almost immediately, in a clichéd fender-bender "meet cute," she finds Prince Charming: professor John Risley, who specializes in the Charleston Renaissance of the 1920s. Soon Cate is installed in the Porgy House (part of Aunt Daisy's beach-rental empire), so named because Charleston Renaissance poet DuBose Heyward and his wife Dorothy lived there while George Gershwin was adapting the Heywards' play Porgy into Porgy and Bess. Around mid-novel, we realize that the sections that have been alternating with Cate's chapters, narrated by Dorothy, are from a one-woman play that John encouraged Cate to write--or, more accurately, a verbiage-choked rough draft of a play. Cate copes with John's impossible goodness, Aunt Daisy's illness, the pregnancy of her son's narcissistic wife and her actress daughter's rants, but her chief preoccupation is proving that Dorothy, not DuBose, was the real librettist and lyricist of Porgy and Bess. The narrative is already bogged down by Dorothy's monologues, but the scenes of Cate's post-opulent life are equally interminable--Frank is seemingly loath to leave anything out, however mundane.

This novel about dramatists, although lightened by some witty down-home repartee, displays little aptitude for scene-craft.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2011
Picking up the pieces of her splintered life after her husband's suicide, Cate Cooper flees cold New Jersey for the warmth of her hometown, Folly Beach, South Carolina. Stopping at the local Piggly Wiggly before heading to the nurturing arms of her elderly aunt Daisy, Cate is involved in a fender bender with one of Folly Beach's most handsome and potentially eligible men. An expert on Charleston's cultural heritage, Professor John Risley is even more smitten with Cate when he finds out she's staying in the Porgy House, Aunt Daisy's beachside cottage, where playwrights Dorothy and DuBose Heyward collaborated with George Gershwin on Porgy and Bess. As the cottage unveils its secrets, Cate contemplates writing a play of her own, encouraged by John's expertise as well as his romantic intentions. Alternating between Cate's personal journey of renewal and flashbacks into the lives of the Heywards, Frank's lush and literary paean to her beloved Low Country provides a romantic glimpse into an artistic past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)