MADDIE PEARL - SOUTHERN WOMAN

MADDIE PEARL - SOUTHERN WOMAN

Maddie Pearl – Southern Woman concludes the saga of an extraordinary young girl’s growth into adulthood. Having survived a turbulent childhood raised by an abusive father and weak, tormented Mama, Maddie Pearl Prine finds a new life beyond her impoverished, eastern North Carolina roots at a fledgling Army base in California’s Mojave Desert on the cusp of World War II. She also finds David “Doc” Hodge, the dreamy “Davy Wavy” with whom she falls deeply in love. Shortly after marriage, however, he is sent to the Pacific Theater, never to return. Without Doc and with increasingly intolerable conditions enveloping her life, Maddie Pearl flees California for John “Bama” Claxton’s mammoth plantation in Alabama. But the grass is not greener there, either. In her late twenties, Maddie Pearl comes back to Carolina to start a new life, with nothing. Her husband is deceased, her soul mate is missing and presumed dead, and her surrogate father has slammed the door in her face—literally. She has no job, no prospects, and no connections beyond a friend she hasn’t seen in years. And then things turn worse upon discovering what is left of her woeful family. But she finds a place to live, reconnects with her best friend, saves her family from poverty-stricken oblivion, and makes a new life in the small college town of Belton, NC. Then everything changes, practically overnight, with the resurrection of her soul mate from certain death in the South Pacific and her ascension to head of Belton National Publishing. As her story concluded in Back In Carolina , Maddie Pearl was on top of the world, until… This is the fourth and final book in the Maddie Pearl series. Because Maddie Pearl’s fictional life was so rich and full, one volume proved far insufficient. The series is chronological, beginning with her birth in 1922 and covering American history from the Great Depression to World War II, McCarthyism, Civil Rights, and even the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show . It is a study of how a seemingly “ordinary” life is full of extraordinary highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, great happiness and deep, soul shattering sorrow. And it’s an American story reflecting much of what is right and wrong in this country, not only in days gone by but generationally to the present.