NEW RELEASE
Magnolia Wednesdays - Wendy Wax (2010)
After a disastrous and humiliating expose leaves her with a bullet wound to her backside, investigative journalist Vivien Armstrong Grey finds herself at a crossroads in her life. She quits her job when she learns she is being pushed aside for a newer, younger version of herself, and soon after, at age 41, discovers she is unexpectedly pregnant. With her boyfriend, Stone, covering the war in Afghanistan, Vivien decides to head home to Atlanta, stay with her widowed sister, Melanie, and take a job reporting on life in suburbia under the pen-name Scarlett Leigh. Using her sister's life, and the friends she makes at the Magnolia Ballroom, as the basis for her column, Vivien finds she has plenty to write about: stay-at-home mums she likens to finely trained triathletes; helicopter parents guiding their children's lives right down to the smallest detail, and prom preparations that rival planning a wedding, all of which she describes with more than a hint of sarcasm. When her column begins to incite rage in the soccer mums she is writing about, and she finds herself growing closer to her sister, niece and nephew, she begins to wonder what keeping secrets will do to her new-found relationships, not to mention her relationship with Stone, whom she has yet to inform of his impending fatherhood. However, before she can figure out a delicate way to let everyone in on her secrets, things go horribly wrong and she is faced with trying to clean up a mess she had hoped to avoid. With a memorable cast of characters, a well-crafted story of friendships and family ties, and a plot twist that I certainly did not see coming, this is a fantastic read that you won't be able to put down and most certainly will not want to end. (LEK)
In Magnolia Wednesdays, by Atlanta-based author Wendy Wax, investigative journalist Vivien is humiliated after taking a bullet in her backside during an expose. At 41 she finds she's pregnant and jobless. So she takes a job covering suburban living back home in Georgia, a column she must write incognito. She uses her sister's ballroom dance studio as her undercover spot to learn about local life. As unexpected friendships develop and she digs up her long-buried roots, Vivien wonders if life inside the picket fence is really so bad after all. Magnolia Wednesdays is out in March.