Sweetwater Creek / Anne Rivers Siddons

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In Anne Rivers Siddons' Sweetwater Creek, we find the coming-of-age story of young Emily Parmenter, a 12-year-old growing up in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Emily is a stranger in her own house, Sweetwater Plantation, where her father and two older brothers hardly know what to do with this girl on the cusp on womanhood.

Emily, whose mother left when she was a baby, just wants someone to love who loves her back. She finds solace of sorts with her impeccably trained Boykin spaniel Elvis. The Parmenters breed and train the spaniels and Emily is actually a bit of a savant when it comes to the family trade.

Nevertheless, her place in the family is an ill-fitting one, and terribly sad as we watch father Walter miss chance after chance to forge a true connection with his only daughter.

The catalyst for change is Lulu Foxworth, the mysteriously troubled college-aged daughter of a prominent Charleston family. When her family visits Sweetwater to see its spaniels, the connection Lulu has with the dogs is immediately apparent. Her parents asks if Lulu can spend the summer at Sweetwater and to Emiy's resentment, Walter immediately assents, eager to find an "in" with high society.

But what came, on the new wings of summer, was Lulu Foxworth, as glistening and beautiful and vulnerable as a beached Portuguese man-o-war, and just as dangerous. And for everyone at Sweetwater everything changed, and nothing ever went back to the way it was before.

The maelstrom Lulu brings with her will affect Emily the most of all.

Siddons crafts a riveting story about the idyll of childhood and the price we pay as we step toward adulthood and move beyond the boundaries of home. Her characters are well-rounded and believable. Emily comes across as a sensible girl who yearns for a kindred spirit, a vulnerability that Lulu latches onto. Even Lulu, conceivably the antagonist of the story, courts our sympathies as we learn of her sordid past. In many ways, she's a child herself.

Their relationship plays out in a way that has you hoping it's for real for Emily's sake. But woven into their developing friendship is an air of unease and even menace. This can only end badly, we think, but we read on because we want to be wrong. Siddons keeps us in her grip to the very end.

Bulls Island / by Dorothea Benton Frank

Twenty years ago something happened that destroyed the happiness of two young people forever. Sweethearts since junior high school, Elizabeth "Betts" Magee and J.D. Langley of Charleston, S.C. were two recent college graduates who'd just become engaged. They were on their way to a storybook marriage when it all came crashing down (literally) one stormy summer night when a mean-spirited gesture by J.D.'s begrudging mother led to Betts' mother's untimely death. The engagement was effectually broken off and the relationship ended with Betts' taking a job offer in New York City and J.D. becoming a permanent part of the family real estate business. Twenty years later not a lot has changed with Betts living successfully in Manhattan ans a Wall Street investment handler and J.D., now married to a loveless wife, is still flourishing in the ever-lucrative enterprise of waterfront property developments. Only now fate has intervened to bring the couple back together again, even if the catalyst is one more of business than pleasure. The Langleys are planning development on the wildlife conservation area of Bulls Island and (supposedly) has the backing of Betts' own firm who's entrusted their interests with the Charleston gal herself, having given her orders to go down there smooth out any ripples in the deal. With the inevitable confrontation imminent, Betts does her best to prepare her nerves for meeting the man she's never gotten over and the huge secret she's never told anyone save her trusted friend back in New York. J.D. meanwhile is still stuck in his childless union to a drugged-out wife whien he hears of his former fiance's pending return and tries not to get his hopes up.

Low Country (coastal SC & Savannah, GA). It's kind of an "it" place now for popular fiction and the like, although you could probably say it has been for a while now--think Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides, John Jakes' Charleston, Anne Rivers Siddons' Low Country, Sue Monk Kidd's Secret Life of Bees, etc. Bulls Island is very low country, very much the south's South. It isn't too bad a book though, easy on the obligatory stereotypes, acceptably simple and not too formulaic. Of course this is a book about the South and no such novel would be complete without references to the heat, old rich families, overweight patriarchs, servants, religion, food, cigars, crooked politics or bourbon--all of which are duely noted well-within the book's first few chapters. You also get the sense that low country people take the past way too seriously, coercing some things which, love, fate, destiny or otherwise, just shouldn't be allowed to 'be'--J.D. and Betts' marriage for one. How else could anyone excuse J.D.'s mother's really, really wicked behavior? This might seem a bit overboard to some readers and you wonder why no one really stands up to her. Frank maybe could have been a little more creative in forcing her star-crossed pair apart than just resorting to a crabby, childish mother-in-law. Others may not mind it so much because of how much more interesting it helps the inherent drama play out and with the culmination of the plot. It's frankly (no pun intended) very pleasant to observe how well the author manages to move the story along with her fluid narrative. (FIC FRANK)