Sweet Vidalia

July 1, 2024

Sandlin (The Bird Boys) turns from her award-winning crime fiction to a novel that explores marriage and community. In 1960s Texas, 57-year-old Eliza Kratke has a good life with a husband, grown children, a nice house, and a dog. When her husband dies suddenly, she realizes that her life has been a lie, and she must rebuild it. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2024
Mystery writer Sandlin (The Bird Boys, 2019) shifts gears in this character study set in Texas in 1964. Paying the funeral home to handle her husband's burial following his sudden death should have been the worst day of Eliza's life, but adding insult to injury, she learns that Robert had wiped out the family finances and taken a mortgage on their paid-off home. The reason for this economic disaster becomes clear when another woman presents herself at the funeral as Mrs. Robert Kratke, and suddenly everything Eliza thought she knew about her nearly 40-year marriage is destroyed. Forced to sell her car and all her possessions, Eliza attempts to put her house on the market only to discover that wife #2 has a lien on the property. Eliza decamps to the only accommodations she can afford, a seedy motel housing similar hard-luck cases. A proud woman in need of an income, Eliza enrolls at a business college. With her colorful classmates and sympathetic fellow lodgers, Eliza rebuilds the community and confidence Robert's betrayal destroyed. Cozy but sobering, quirky, and uplifting.

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October 7, 2024
An East Texas widow discovers her late husband was leading a double life in the appealing latest from Sandlin (Family Business). It’s 1964 and Eliza Kratke, 57, is doubly crushed, first by the sudden death of her husband of 30 years, Robert, from what appears to be a heart attack, and then after the funeral home’s secretary tells her another Mrs. Kratke has been making a fuss, claiming she was married to Robert. To make matters worse, Eliza discovers her finances are in shambles; Robert left her nothing but debt. Devastated, she retreats to her bed and stays there for weeks. When a collection agency tries to repossess the car, she manages to hold them off and sell it. She tries to sell the house, too, but finds a lien has been placed against it by the other Mrs. Kratke, so she rents it out for the time being, moves into a cheap hotel, and enrolls in a business course. The classroom is chock-full of colorful characters, including an artist who makes counterfeit money and a gay man who offers to help Eliza land a secretary job. Though the detours into these characters’ stories makes the novel feel a bit scattered, Sandlin manages to evoke Eliza’s can-do spirit as she perseveres through one challenge after another. This will move readers. Agent: Jennifer Thompson, Nordlyset Literary.

October 15, 2024
A recent widow copes with a surprising new life in Sandlin's buoyant latest, set in 1964 in a small Texas town. When railroad man Robert Kratke unexpectedly dies of a heart attack, Eliza, his wife of 30 years, discovers that he had been living a double life, with another wife and family on the other side of town, and that the savings she thought they had have vanished. Reluctant to burden her children by moving in with them, she rents out their house--which she can't sell, because the other wife has put a lien on it--and moves into an efficiency in the Sweet Vidalia Residence Inn, a motel populated mostly by students and others in their early 20s. With no work experience and three years before she will be eligible for her husband's Social Security benefits, she enrolls in business school and finds she has an aptitude for the material. As she gets to know her neighbors and fellow students and finds an unlikely business opportunity, she evolves from a "preparer" who "dislike[s] suspense" to someone who's delighted to realize that her "life is lively." Despite a somewhat erratic plot, in which Sandlin introduces new characters and dilemmas at a brisk pace without resolving all of them, the novel has a nostalgic charm, and it's impossible not to cheer for Eliza and the members of her motley tribe. Sandlin tempers the more melodramatic elements with quirky humor, and she has a gift for summing up a character in a sentence or two, like the classmate with "doll-baby eyelashes" and a "contrary laugh, made up of malice and merriness." Fans of Anne Tyler should be happy to greet Sandlin as a Texan cousin. A novel that endearingly proves it's never to too late to come of age.

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