CHIMES FROM A CRACKED SOUTHERN BELLE
By Susan Reinhardt
A new novel just released and selected as a Top Summer Read 2013 by the University of Georgia and a Pulpwood Queens 2013 selection, and written by the bestselling author of “Not Tonight Honey: Wait Til I’m a Size 6.”
I am a SIBA member and have links to the Indies on my website at www.susanreinhardt.com I’m also a past guest speaker at a SIBA conference and am currently doing ads with Lady Banks and Galley Giveaways. To enhance customers, I have lots of free “swag” to send bookstores to go with the book’s theme. Readers seem to love free stuff with purchases.
The Buzz:
Here’s what people are saying about “Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle,” which I hope you will carry.
"I love Susan Reinhardt's sharp-witted humor and hilarious characters." Sara Gruen, New York Times bestselling author of Water for Elephants and Ape House.
“I have had the very great pleasure of reading excerpts from Susan Reinhardt's new novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle. It is just a marvel of wit in that grand southern tradition in which we laugh in order not to cry. This is summer reading. Visit her website, order her book, look for her readings. Do anything you can. Just exchanging an email with Susan makes my day.” Elaine Neil Orr, bestselling author of “A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa:
You don't have to be from the South to fall in love with Susan Reinhardt's novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle. Reinhardt shows her fiction chops in this hilarious, offbeat and painfully accurate portrayal of one woman's journey back to sanity in the South. --Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author of Lost in Suburbia: A Memoir: How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs.
Susan Reinhardt's Southern roots show in her debut novel. Reinhardt can pass my personal litmus test for humorists--crying so hard you can barely breathe, then laughing so hard you blow a snot bubble with your nose. --Robin O'Bryant, author of best-selling Ketchup is a Vegetable and other Lies Moms Tell Themselves.
Summary:
Most people think the reason Dee Millings, (a pretty good looking but slightly overweight wanna-be nurse), married the best looking man in the Carolinas who turned out to be a complete psycho and near-murderer, is because she was raised all wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and Dee, a 38-year-old heroine to root for, sets out on a path winding with loveable kooks, wanting to prove there is a great life on the other side of tragedy and an ex behind bars who continues to mail threatening letters from prison.
Dee’s new adventure begins two years after the crime spree that nearly stopped her heart and left her flat-lining.
She packs up her two young kids and settles in her parents’ South Carolina home town where she rents what her mother calls a “pitiful apartment” and deals with a delightful, but over-the-top mama who still pretends her grown daughters are virgins.
Lucinda Millings and her proper morals, begins each day ushering a slew of proverbs and is a stark contrast to her sister - Dee’s Aunt Weepie who lives to crash funerals just to get the covered-dish meals after the gravesides, no matter she has no idea who’s in the coffins. This is the same wild aunt who enjoys nothing better than dry martinis sipped from the nest she created beneath her four-poster bed and ends up making a daring decision that could change Dee’s life forever.
Dee finds new purpose for herself, her kids and discovers love where she never excepted it: in a nursing home where she tends to the likes of 104-year-old Annie Sue who still drives and has a hankering for cold draft beer and fixing her hair up like the celebs in the gossip rags.
As Dee begins a journey toward recovery and becoming a registered nurse, the hijinks of her aunt, mother and the residents at the nursing home prove just the medicine to soothe her once-damaged soul, allowing a terrible secret to resurface, one that if handled right, could be her ticket to love and forgiveness.
