Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch

By Haywood Smith

Lin Scott is recovering from her divorce, which left her destitute. She ends up moving back in with her parents, a sorry situation as far as she, a woman in her fifties, is concerned.
Tension is high at home. Her mom is a bit controlling, her dad is fading into senility. Her alcoholic brother also lives there as does her elderly aunt and uncle. The uncle is also senile and off his medication.
Lin was a wife and mother. Her husband was successful and she never had to have a job outside of the home. She has never used a computer, she never graduated from college and she has arthritis, so a job where she has to be on her feet is out. But somehow she has to figure out a way to support herself. Relying on her elderly parents is not fair to them even though they are glad to have her back home.
She lucks into a job when she stops by the local drugstore. One of the clerks has collapsed and been taken to the hospital and won't be fit to return to work for many weeks. Since Lin used to work at this drugstore when she was a high schooler, she steps in to lend a hand and lands a temporary job. She is also going to night school, studying to get a real estate license.
Things are definitely looking up for Lin and the hunky new owner of the drugstore is more than just a little interested in his new employee.

This is an okay story. It is mainly about Lin finding her way in her new situation, with a little romance thrown in. There is also a political subplot that I found completely boring and uninteresting. Also, a one point early in the story, it is revealed that Lin's parents are having money troubles but that is never dealt with beyond a few mentions. Plus, even knowing this, she still lets her mother pay for the real estate course. Also, Lin dreads moving back in with the parents because they are such a pain to live with. But they don't seem to be that horrible in the story and her judgment of them as difficult is not really illustrated.
I think the story has quite a few gaps and would have been more interesting without the politics story.

Ladies of the Lake

By Haywood Smith

Dahlia was her grandmother's favorite grandchild. Cissy, the grandmother, encouraged Dahlia to study ballet and she was very proud of Dahlia's accomplishments as a professional dancer. However, in her later years, her mind began to fail, and in the beginning of this story, she tries to shoot Dahlia and one of her other sisters when she mistakes them for rapists. And thus begins this story of four sisters living together for one summer in the house their now deceased grandmother left them.
For Cissy has stipulated in her will that the four women cannot inherit her property, which is worth millions, unless they spend three months together in the house. Cissy, even though it appeared she favored Dahlia best, still wanted the sisters to have better relationships with each other and hit upon this method to achieve her goal.
Dahlia gets along best with her sister Violet, has a neutral relationship with sister Rose and doesn't get along with sister Iris at all, which is mainly the fault of Iris, who has always been jealous of all the attention Dahlia's talent as a dancer has gotten her. Violet, Rose and Iris all have stable marriages but Dahlia's marriage is kaput. Dahlia's husband ran off with his secretary and all his and Dahlia's money, including a refinance of their home, which has left Dahlia hanging on by the skin of her teeth. The money from the sale of Granny's lakeside acres will enable Dahlia to hang on to her home and keep her ballet school up and running.
Staying at the old house brings back lots of memories of their childhoods spent at the lake. Various complications arise, including Dahlia's weird health problems and allergies, the discovery of two long dead bodies in a bricked up root cellar in Granny's basement, and Dahlia getting attacked by chiggers and later on by a rapid raccoon. Dahlia gains a love interest in local boy done good Clete Slocum, who, it turns out, knew old Granny better than anyone in her family, including her favorite, Dahlia.

This was a pretty good story. Dahlia is very weird, what with the ballet moves she does when she is bored or distracted, the quoting of lines from movies, her strange health problems and allergies, her religiousness and her propensity for getting herself into trouble. Iris is just plain mean. Violet and Rose don't play much of a role in the story, Violet mainly threatens to pound Iris and Rose tries to keep the peace. The granny's relationship with Clete and his relatives was also strange, she was more involved with them than with her own family. She had a whole thing going on with them that her real family never even knew about. Also Dahlia's decision to dump Clete to go back to her marginal life in Atlanta didn't really make a lot of sense either. There where a lot of things in the story that just didn't ring true. Like Dahlia is so religious she stops to pray at the drop of a hat yet sees nothing wrong with breaking the law when it suits her: she talks the sisters into taking the bodies from the basement and dumping them in a park because she doesn't want to slow down the possible sale of Granny's land and she see nothing wrong with routinely driving faster than the posted speed limit. And the granny so concerned with her granddaughters relationships, yet spent more time helping out the neighbors than she did with her own relatives. And Clete being so hung up on Dahlia who he really doesn't know at all and yet keeping all kinds of secrets from this woman who is supposed to be the love of his life. And the cops not following up on their discovery of who dumped the bodies in the park.
Despite this, it made for a pretty good story, even though I thought Dahlia was a pain and a pill and if I'd been her sister I probably wouldn't have been able to stand her either. Some parts of the story were pretty funny, like when Dahlia got all eaten up with chiggers or when she started doing ballet moves at the hardware store. So even though I didn't really like Dahlia very much, I did like the story and I enjoyed reading it, though I was disappointed that the dead bodies in the cellar plot turned out so tamely.