Guest post and Giveaway: Summer in the South by Cathy Holton

Today it is my extreme pleasure to welcome Cathy Holton to Pudgy Penguin Perusals. Cathy's new book, Summer in the South, was a big hit with me. A 5* rating means I just couldn't put the book down. Check out my review. Sounds like a good summer read? Most definitely! After Cathy's post, be sure to enter the drawing for one copy of the book. See details below.

How did the idea for Summer in the South originate? 

by Cathy Holton

     Twenty-five years ago I went with a friend to visit her Great-Aunt Fanny in Franklin, Tennessee.  Fanny lived in an imposing house filled with treasures; a large sterling silver collection, oil portraits of dead ancestors, a framed letter from Thomas Jefferson to Fanny’s great-great-great-grandfather.  I was immediately entranced by Randal’s illustrious family history and their quietly understated, old-money wealth.

            Fanny was a lovely woman, intelligent and funny and filled with a buoyant spirit.  There were photographs of her and her deceased husband everywhere; standing in front of a sea plane, crouching beside a water buffalo, having cocktails in a Paris café.  On the second day of our visit, we went with Fanny to the cemetery to visit the dead.  Watching as she knelt to put flowers on a grave set apart from the others, I asked Randal, “Who’s buried there?”

            “Her husband.”

            “The one in all the photographs?”

“No, that’s the second husband.  The one over there is her first husband, Charlie.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died.  We don’t speak of him.”

            I couldn’t get anything else out of her.  Nothing inspires a writer’s imagination like curiosity, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Fanny and her first husband, whom she had obviously loved very much.  And I couldn’t stop wondering what had happened between Fanny and Charlie that would keep her family from mentioning his name sixty years later.

            Twenty-five years later, I wrote Summer in the South, the story of a Chicago writer trying to escape her troubled past who finds love, redemption, and a sixty-year-old murder mystery in a small Southern town.

            Did the love story between Fanny and Charlie happen as I imagined it?  Are the things that happened to Ava there in that old house in Woodburn real?

            The answers to both questions, I suppose, lie clearly in the realm of fiction.

Cathy, thank you so much for visiting with us today.

Thanks to Cathy's generosity, I have one copy of Summer in the South to give away to one of my followers. Open to US and Canada. Deadline to enter is July 1st. Since this is a followers (old or new) only giveaway the 3 bonus entries this month will be for blogging about or tweeting about the giveaway. Be sure to include your e mail address in the comment box. Please, please, please do not leave three comments that you tweeted. One box is sufficient.

Review: Summer in the South by Cathy Holton

Hardcover, 352 pages

Published May 24th 2011 by Ballantine Books

ISBN: 0345506014 (ISBN13: 9780345506016)

Ava Dabrowski is still mourning the death of her mother, reeling from the breakup with her married lover and disenchanted with her job. So when Will Fraser, an old college acquaintance, asks her one more time to visit him in Woodburn, Tennessee, she quits her job in Chicago and accepts even though she has some not too flattering preconceived notions of "The South". He lures her with the idea that she can stay with his two great-aunts, Josephine and Fanny Woodburn,  in the family home for the entire summer and finally work on that novel she keeps wanting to write.

Unfortunately, Ava seems to have a bad case of writer's block and she doesn't make too much progress on her book but she is fascinated by the Woodburn's family history as her own family history is sketchy at best and staying in one location was not one of her free-spirited mother's strengths. She is amazed that one family could live in a town named after them for so long and in the same house. To the Woodburns living in the South means no one is "crazy" just eccentric, manners are an ingrained way of life and knowledge of one's family tree is almost de riguer.

What seems like genteel family living turns out to have some deep buried secrets and dark undertones. After  Ava starts hearing snippets of Will's Aunt Fanny and her first husband Charlie's past, the mystery of his death begins to intrigue her and her writer's block is at an end. It's almost as if the story writes itself; she spends night after night penning Charlie and Fanny's story at a frenzied pace even though she knows the Woodburns will be livid at any hint of exposure. They sure aren't willing to say too much about this time in their lives.

I don't want to give away too much more of the story. This book has it all; southern setting with a gothic atmosphere, love, hate, jealousy, passion, family dynamics, black sheep and skeletons, estrangement, revenge, repentence, surprise twists, history, murder, self-discovery and even a little paranormal thrown in. Phew! I think I got it all.

Cathy Holton grabbed me from the beginning with her tale, her fantastic characters and sense of place that never let me go until the last word. I loved it. Loved! It !! All of it; beginning, middle, end. There wasn't a lag anywhere in the book. This is the first 5* book I've read in months. A perfect beach read or any other place for that matter! Just read it.

One lucky follower of this blog will have a chance to win a copy when Cathy visits here soon. Her guest post will be where you can enter.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by Ballantine Books through the early reviewer program at LT.