Look Away, Look Away

I received a pre-publication copy of Wilton Barnhardt's new book Look Away, Look Away (#312) in a GoodReads giveaway.  All things Southern are skewered, lambasted and barbecued in this wicked and juicy novel. 

Set in Charlotte, North Carolina from 2003 through 2012, each chapter is told from the point of view of a different member of the extended Johnston - Jarvis family.  In a family as dysfunctional as this, you can be sure that there are plenty of scandals and secrets and each member of the family in turn parts with them gleefully in some cases, most reluctantly in others.  And all the while the reader is asking "What next?" and nursing paper cuts from flipping the pages so fast in an effort to find out.

Mind you, I almost stopped reading this book in the middle of the first chapter about Jerilyn, the youngest Johnston, when her whole goal in life was to find the very tackiest sorority on the North Carolina campus and rush it in total defiance of her controlling mother Jerene.  The wretched excess of this apparently widely-accepted campus lifestyle was enough for me to call it quits right there.  But I did feel obligated to continue on and as soon as a new character was introduced, I never looked back.  But that, I suppose, was the whole reason for starting off this way with Jerilyn, a total waste of good space.  It's the perfect foundation for what follows in this novel of money and appearances with a Southern high gloss.  Even the structure of Look Away, Look Away is a sly poke at the failed ambitions of the Johnston pater familias with his Civil War study and encyclopedic knowledge of the War of Northern Aggression, and his wildly successful Civil War novelist and alcoholic brother-in-law.

Unless they can take a joke well, I don't think that Look Away, Look Away will ever get a favorable review from Southern Living, but for the rest of us, this  book is bound to be a pleasurable guilty read, especially if you're Southern yourself, or have ever had a mind-boggling encounter with someone Southern!  This book is scheduled to be published August 20, 2013.