When Southern Girls Grow Old: Three Homecomings

This novel tells the comic antics, hapless adventures, and emotional and physical traumas of three women as they come to grips with aging. Although they come from the same southern family, their diverse circumstances and temperaments lead them down very different paths. Mavis Horton assumes the identity of a former invisible playmate, robs a jewelry story, evens the score with a man who has taken her for granted for decades, finds the mother she thought was dead, gets a concussion, and wakes up in the hospital a new woman. Sammie Jo Horton Wooten changes her name, empties the contents of her house into the yard, and runs away. When her husband finds her, she’s not the same girl he married fifty years earlier. Elmira Horton papers her walls with jigsaw puzzles, breaks her leg, falls in love with an itinerant roofer, and gets her heart broken. As each woman is transformed and redeemed, she embraces a new season in her life—and new reasons for living.