Plant Life, the second novel by North Carolina writer Pamela Duncan, adeptly captures the complex emotions of one Southerner’s return home. Readers are introduced to Laurel Granger, a long-time resident of Las Vegas, shortly after her divorce from her husband of 15 years. Proving that age and station in life don’t matter much when it comes to a broken heart, Laurel retreats home to Russell, North Carolina.

As December turns to February, Laurel eases slowly back into the familiar routine of small-town Southern life. After years of attempting to distance herself from the place and carefully monitoring her voice for even a trace of a North Carolina accent, she gradually begins to feel comfortable in her hometown once again. The absence of a place to buy a glass of wine and the constant bumping into former classmates, though, remain trials endured through gritted teeth.

With Laurel firmly re-established in Russell and employed at the same textile plant as her mother, a subtle transformation takes place. Laurel begins to appreciate being in a close-knit community. She allows her preferences and tastes to develop after years of ignoring them for the sake of her now defunct marriage. While the expected cast of traditional Southern characters makes an appearance in Duncan’s novel, each is fully developed in a deliberate, meaningful way. From Laurel’s high school sweetheart who, of course, is now married to a former cheerleader to the family neighbor who tenderly cares for Laurel’s mother during an extended illness, Russell is populated by believable folks who are a far cry from the usual saccharine stereotypes.

A novel as much about personal strength and integrity as the daily lives of mill women, Plant Life beautifully captures the passage of two seasons in a small-town. Mentored by author Lee Smith, Pamela Duncan won fans and critical praise for her first novel, Moon Women, in 2001. With her second book, she confirms her place as a superior Southern storyteller. Whitney Weeks is a writer for Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Some girls live on cigarettes, booze, heartbreak and petty disasters, until fate turns their lifetime of humiliation into a fairy tale ending. At least, that’s how it is for a certain brand of English anti-heroine, made popular by chick-lit star Bridget Jones. Now, there’s the charming and sometimes exasperating Grace Armiger in Wendy Holden’s latest novel, Gossip Hound. In this outing, Holden (Farm Fatale, Simply Divine, Bad Heir Day) skewers the British book publishing biz, lining up London tabloid journalism in her sights as well.

Grace, daughter of aristocratic career diplomats, is ensconced in the PR department at Hatto ∧ Hatto, a rarified London literary publisher. Her days are filled with the dubious challenge of rousing interest from absolutely anyone in her obscure, eccentric authors. She stumbles through publicity plans for these would-bes and has-beens, even stooping to a booze-fueled pity shag with Henry, an attractive adventurer and author of a worthy memoir that tanks despite her best efforts. Grace feels as chewed up as Hatto, the only publishing house proud to be without a bestseller ever and going down the toilet with elitist Žlan.

Equally damaging to personal growth is Grace’s grubby, leftist boyfriend who drags her to “bucket rattlings” and rants about Grace’s “exploitation” of her well-paid Eastern European maid Maria. Meanwhile, vicious and gorgeous Belinda Black, hack London columnist with a heart of coal, will stop at nothing to steal a fellow journalist’s celebrity profiles job. After putting her rival in the hospital and pissing off the paper with libelous lies about an A-list British starlet, Belinda decides the hot American actor Red Campion is her next worthy target. And if he won’t say yes, she’ll stalk him.

As these two sink to all-time professional lows Grace with touching ineptitude and Belinda with the focus of a Scud missile it’s clear their paths will cross with a vengeance. But before the shoe drops, Grace meets an American multimedia mogul who becomes, along with deus ex machina Maria, a central figure in the revival of her shaky career and love life.

The plot takes a while to warm up, but eventually pays off, especially when taking on London media pretensions and the heart-stopping confusions of romance. Gossip Hound is a softly satirical story that rolls along on the strength of appealing characters and wry humor, rather than one-liners.

Forced outdoors by cabin fever during a spring snowstorm, five suburban women plunge into a spontaneous evening snowball fight. When they come inside later to warm up, a remarkable set of friendships is launched one that will span 30 years and three tumultuous decades of social change.

As in previous bestsellers such as Patty Jane’s House of Curl and The Great Mysterious, Lorna Landvik sets her fifth novel in her native small-town Minnesota, where she meticulously chronicles the activities of the Freesia Court Book Club and the lives of its five members: Faith, Audrey, Merit, Slip and Kari (as in car, not care). The book club is not-so-lovingly renamed Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Merit’s husband, who is jealous of her friendship with the other women. From the spring of 1968 through the fall of 1998, the book club members read selections as eclectic as the women themselves from Soul on Ice to Middlemarch to Stephen King’s The Stand.

Living through the era of the Vietnam war, the protest movement and women’s liberation, the five friends take on such problems as domestic violence, infidelity, homophobia and empty nests, bolstered by the restorative powers of friendship. Landvik looks back at the childhood experiences of the book club members and follows along as they raise children of their own from the annual neighborhood circus through college acceptances and careers, all accompanied by a host of maternal fears and worry. So convincing are the details that readers will try to guess what Audrey might wear to book club meetings and predict what Slip will think of the books. Readers might feel a twinge of sadness and loss as they turn the last page of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons finishing this book is like leaving five dear friends. Alice Pelland writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Cassandra King’s new novel, The Sunday Wife, a tale of a woman who doesn’t belong in the place where she finds herself and the like-minded misfits she befriends, is one of those books that keeps you up till three in the morning and makes you wake up three hours later to pick up where you left off.

Dean (Willodean) Lynch is the wife of Ben, pastor of the Methodist church in Crystal Springs, Florida. Uneasy in both Crystal Springs and her marriage, the mousy, middle-aged and endlessly self-deprecating Dean is still determined, like the foster child she was, to make the best of things. But the world she struggles to make tidy is upended forever when she meets the Holderfields the handsome Maddox and his madcap wife Augusta, a woman who is as out of place in Crystal Springs as Dean is, but gets away with it because of the position her husband’s wealthy and powerful family holds in the town.

Dean is immediately smitten, first by Augusta’s beauty and then by her sheer bad-girl recklessness. One of the funniest scenes in this frequently funny book is when she and Dean rush down to a marina to warn Augusta’s two-timing friend of the imminent arrival of his wife and son, and end up spending the night on his boat. Augusta makes Dean see that her own horizons can open up, despite Crystal Springs and the appalling Ben, who is so priggish, self-centered and utterly lacking in empathy the reader may wonder, first, how Dean could have stood being married to this hateful creep for 20 years and, second, when he’s going to meet the horrible death he deserves. Unfortunately, Ben isn’t the one who buys it, and the novel’s central tragedy throws Dean’s life, and the lives of her friends, onto paths they couldn’t have foreseen.

King, the wife of novelist Pat Conroy, is a graceful writer, and her descriptions of people, places and things range from delicate to deadly; the seafood meals depicted in the book made this reviewer go out and buy oysters for bisque, and the scenes of beaches in moonlight and sunlight are achingly beautiful. King also excels at keeping the plot cooking, page after page. The Sunday Wife is a tasty and irresistible treat. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

A nervous teenaged couple dumps a newborn in a box at the door of an elegant-looking country house. It’s a strange way to begin a book called <B>Blessings</B>, but the story that follows is stranger still, though entirely mesmerizing.

The driver was in such a hurry that he abandoned the baby in front of the garage instead of the house proper, and the young handyman recently out of jail was the one to discover the baby, still alive.

So far, so good. Now, do you think the handyman, Skip Cuddy, would decide to take care of the baby? Can you see him studying a baby book, buying diapers and formula? Carrying her around in a chest-pack while he works, and naming her Faith? Me neither. But author Anna Quindlen can, and she has a talent for getting readers to view life on her terms. Perhaps it comes from her years as a columnist, first for <I>The New York Times</I> and now for <I>Newsweek</I>. She puts Skip into the nurturing role of caregiver and writes with such feeling that readers cannot easily dismiss him.

Most people turn out the way you would expect," Skip muses near the end of the novel. But not all. Not by a long shot." Readers who believe in Skip will be rewarded by a story they cannot put down. It reaches back into the past and involves much more than one baby’s lot, though on the surface that propels the plot. The tension between appearance and reality and the lasting influence of childhood experience are underlying themes.

At the center of the book is the sprawling white country house called Blessings, where Skip lives over the garage, and the very demanding Lydia Blessings, 80, lives alone in the house. The abandoned baby becomes a welcome responsibility. Faith’s innocent presence helps Lydia to see life clearly, for once, and to realize that doing good can be more rewarding than doing what looks right to the rest of the world. But don’t listen too hard for a swelling of violins. This is Quindlen; the ending is bittersweet. <I>Anne Morris writes in Austin, Texas.</I>