Everyone’s idea of summer reading is different.  For some, no reading is all they want out of summer.  For others, this is their chance to catch up on all the best-sellers they missed all year.  Some people plan their summer reading; some wing it.  Some will savor one book while others have stacks and still cannot decide what to read.  And if you do not believe me, just visit YouTube, and type in reading recommendations and watch the sheer volume of possibilities. 

 

One of the mainstays of summer reading is the Southern novel with loads of secrets and family tragedy.  Pamela Terry’s novel, “The Sweet Taste of Muscadines” certainly fits this bill.  Lila Bruce Breedlove is a pastor’s daughter who fled from her southern home decades ago to find new roots in Maine.  Now she is summoned home when her mother is found face down dead in the muscadine arbor, a place that she never visited. 

 

Once home, the shocks keep coming.  There is nothing mysterious about her mother’s death; she had a heart condition that her doctor had warned her was fatal, but she told no one about it.  Then comes the family attorney who tells them she does not want a funeral when the whole town expects one.  Their youngest sister who has been closest to their mother discovers the body and is outraged by all the secrets her supposedly close mother had been keeping from her family and then dyes her hair bright red and carries a bottle of whiskey in her purse. 

 

Lila and her brother, Henry, decide to find out exactly what their mother was trying to dig up in the muscadine arbor, and the results propel them on a new adventure to unravel the truth after forty years. 

 

“The Sweet Taste of Muscadines” has all the flavor of the South in a moving story of how expectations can destroy lives, but love can bring redemption