Moon Over Edisto
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
The past has come knocking on Julia’s door. Can she summon the courage to answer betrayal with love?
Once, they were the happiest family under the sun, crabbing and fishing and painting on beautiful Edisto Island in South Carolina’s lowcountry. Then everything went wrong, and twenty years later the Bennett family is still in pieces. Mary Ellen still struggles to understand why her picture-perfect marriage came apart. Daughter Meg keeps a death grip on her own family, controlling her relationships at a distance. And Julia thought she left it all behind.
Julia’s best friend, Marney, broke up her parents’ marriage years ago. Now Marney shows up at her Manhattan apartment, asking the impossible—come home to Edisto Island to care for the half-sisters and half-brother she has never known. Marney, recently widowed, has lung cancer. There’s no other family to care for the children while she’s in the hospital following surgery.
Julia loathes Marney. But if she doesn’t step in, her own mother—who has never gotten over the divorce—will be called upon to take care of the children. So Julia heads to South Carolina to keep the peace.
Julia grudgingly agrees to stay a week caring for her three young half-siblings. But there’s something about Edisto that changes one, and she begins to reconnect with the place and the people that she's been running from her whole adult life.
Can Julia and her fractured family somehow manage to come together again under that low-hanging Edisto moon?
Contemporary Southern Christian fictionIncludes discussion questions for book clubsAlso by Beth Webb Hart: The Wedding Machine and Love, Charleston
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hart (Sunrise on the Battery) has crafted a heartwarming story of compassion and forgiveness amid the colorful landscape of South Carolina's low country. Julia Bennett enjoyed an idyllic life growing up in a stately home in Charleston with younger sister, Meg. Their father Charles, a lawyer who loved to paint, and their mother Mary Ellen, a homemaker who loved to cook, completed their perfect nuclear family. The family drew even closer when at their rustic cottage on Edisto Island. There they would "wet a line," paint, and frolic in the warm summer sun, often in the company of Marney, Julia's best friend from college, until circumstances left Marney and Charles spending a summer alone at the cottage. Charles' indiscretion did more than end his marriage; it devastated his relationship with his daughters and the girls' relationship with each other. Only Aunt Dot seems to be able to bridge the gap between family members, until Marney has a need that only Julia can meet. Hart's rich detail enhances each element, from the mouthwatering menus to the soul-wrenching confrontations, in this engaging and thought-provoking tale.
