FALLING HOME (Karen White)

Some of my friends reads Karen White, so I thought I'd take a chance and find out why.  This was actually Ms. White's first book, reworked years later and republished.  The author herself points to the difference all of those years of writing experience have made in the quality of her novel!

The story seemed a little bit familiar when I started the book and I remember thinking, Sweet Home Alabama!  A southern girl runs away to New York City when events in the small town of her youth threaten to overwhelm her.  She reinvents herself, achieves success, becomes engaged to a sophisticated successful man, and loses her accent.  When she returns home after years away she is resistant to being drawn in to the bucolic, unsophisticated life she left behind, but strangely drawn to the past she has worked relentlessly to erase.

This isn't Sweet Home Alabama, although it is definitely romantic and a tear-jerker, just what we look for in women's fiction.  I found Sam's undying love for Cassie a bit too predictable (duh, what is the inevitable ending?) and Harriet to be just a bit too saintly (does the woman EVER get angry at anything or anyone?), and the town was just a bit too supportive and respectful of pretty much everyone and everything.  But, you know what?  This is fiction.  Most of us want to escape into a book, to experience vicariously emotions and situations that we might fear, avoid, or long for in our real lives.  Who wouldn't want to return to their hometown to discover that people from the past are still willing to embrace and forgive?  Who wouldn't want to discover that the nerdy yet compassionate boy that they barely noticed has grown into a successful, hunky man with the patience of a saint and relentless devotion to his first love?  Who wouldn't want to be able to look at their life through a different lens and see it for what it really is?  I think that White has given most readers exactly what they want, a story about overcoming the worst that life can dish out and still being able to enjoy a happy ending.  This is a great book for a rainy day.  Just be sure to have a few tissues handy for the second half!