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The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc: A Novel Kindle Edition
Sissy just never imagined temptation would come into her life that breathless summer day as she sat smoking on her porch swing. For although she may have been fixated on the taut muscles of the lineman shimmying down the telephone pole across the street, she hadn't allowed herself to imagine that he'd be none other than her high school sweetheart, Parker Davidson, who left town fourteen years before without so much as a wave good-bye. But suddenly, here he is, leaning in for a kiss that will stir up more excitement than Sissy could ever have imagined...
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2009
- File size1779 KB
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About the Author
Loraine Despres is the author of the bestselling novel The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc and its tie-in title, The Southern Belle's Handbook. Raised in Amite, Louisiana, Despres is a former television writer and international screenwriting consultant. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and continues to enjoy bad behavior.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FCKET0
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (March 17, 2009)
- Publication date : March 17, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1779 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 352 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0060505885
- Best Sellers Rank: #845,209 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4,206 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- #6,737 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #22,020 in Contemporary Romance Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Writing is easy. Good writing is agony.
Never-the-less I'm a writer. That's what I do. Fortunately I've actually been able to make a living at it. In a former life, I wrote educational radio in Chicago and advertising in Paris. I wrote poetry and plays in New Orleans, where I won some awards, was published, and produced, but I wanted to break into show business. So I packed up my son and headed for Hollywood.
Within two years I was writing network television. I worked on a lot of shows you'll probably remember, but I was most famous for penning that icon of pop culture, the 'Who Shot J.R.?' episode of DALLAS. It was a big deal and at the time the most watched show in history.
I quit TV in the 90s to fulfill a life-long ambition. I wanted people to read my words as I'd written them and not think some beautiful actor made them up. I believed I'd be able to finish my first book THE SCANDALOUS SUMMER OF SISSY LEBLANC in six months. It took me three long years and for a while nobody wanted to publish it, although editors agreed it was beautifully written. They said so in their rejection letters. They also said they didn't know how to sell it. Then Rebecca Wells, bless her heart, published the Devine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and suddenly there was a market.
A perspicacious editor at William Morrow bought SCANDALOUS SISSY. It became a Literary Guild Selection, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a national best-seller and is now in its 21st printing in paperback. Sissy is the ultimate Desperate Housewife, trapped in a little town in a bad marriage when her old high school boyfriend comes back.
My second book, THE SOUTHERN BELLE'S HANDBOOK, SISSY LEBLANC'S RULES TO LIVE BY, was published because people kept telling me they were going through SCANDALOUS SUMMER and writing down all Sissy's 'Rules.' It's a little gift book and a compilation of Sissy's wisdom.
My new novel, now going into its second paperback printing, is THE BAD BEHAVIOR OF BELLE CANTRELL. It's about Sissy's wild suffragist grandmother Belle when she was a beautiful young widow who kicked up her heels in 1920. It's another story of murder, adultery, and regular church attendance, but on a deeper level it's a story of intolerance and love, my main themes, and one woman's search for her moral center in a violent time, much like today.
Quick update: My son, David Mulholland, whom I packed up and moved to California, is now a writer and editor living in London. I continue to live in Los Angeles with my writer-producer husband, Carleton Eastlake, and continue to enjoy bad behavior.
For more check out: www.LoraineDespres.com.
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The Sissy LeBlanc readers first encounter is awash in a loveless marriage, silently suffocating while living with her truly egregious husband Peewee. A proverbial long-lost love reappears and kindles passion and turmoil; through her relationship with Parker Davidson, Sissy emerges from a self-imposed exile from life. Sissy's internal monologues, often peppered with numerous adages from a never-written but often quoted "Southern Belle's Handbook," assist her in coming to grips with the need to make decisions and live by their consequences. Living in the pre-feminist 1950s South, Sissy has precious few resources on which to depend as she fashions an imagined new life.
Despite the rich possibilities inherent in a novel which treats sexual repression and the impact of corrupt patriarchy, Loraine Despres comes close to, but does not achieve, the creation of fully-believable characters. Several characters evolve stereotypically, becoming mere foils to Sissy LeBlanc. Peewee, her husband, could have been given much more humanity. Even though Despres allows us to feel sympathy for him as a result of his loutish father, Bourreee, Peewee never transcends his porcine-like presence in the novel. Despres could have created a masterful work had she given her characters more, rather than less, humanity. The author needs to realize that her protagonist could have prevailed over far more formidable foes than the unidimensional antagnoists who populate Gentry.
Equally grating are the excessive references to the aforementioned "Southern Belle's Handbook." While facilitating understanding of both the narrative of the novel and the development of Sissy's character when placed at the beginning of each chapter, Despres bogs down her writing when Sissy debates as to what number each rule was or should be. What could have been a delightful addition to the novel has a tendency to be an annoying contrivance.
These complaints, however, truly do not interfere with the readers's enjoyment of "Scandalous Summer." Containing the gripping force of strong melodrama and featuring the tenacious struggle of a strong protagonist to realize her hopes for personal freedom and true love, the novel is not pretentious or predictable. Loraine Despres' debut reveals an author who knows how to tell a story and entertain her audience.
Sissy's oldest son is the first big surprise, cool, calculating and somewhat sinister. Then we learn why—he’s inherited the traits from his loathsome father, Sissy’s father-in-law! I greatly appreciate how Despres drops in the story revelations after she gets the scandals started. Like Clara, Sissy's half black cousin, whose stepdad goes to jail for marrying Clara’s black mother because Sissy’s white Uncle Tibor, her real biological father, doesn’t want anyone messing with his women. It is a beautifully braided and tightly twisted Southern swamp saga infested with racist, sexist, good ‘ol boys. And there's so much great sensual input—sounds, smells, sights. Despres' use of the close third person lets us get into everyone’s head in their turn, even PeeWee, Sissy's sad sack husband, who I ended up feeling sympathetic to. He’s just as oppressed by his father as the women are.
The rules randomly numbered throughout are funny, great, wise, and the names are southern wonderful—Bourree, Tibor, even if those men are despicable. The sex is very sexy—whether it’s for pleasure or abuse. I also greatly appreciated how Despres handled Sissy’s teenage sexual obsession with Bourree. Acknowledging young girls’ consensual encounters with older men is taboo these days, but the relationship makes sense and is believable the way Despres portrays it for Sissy.
Truly horrendous things happen to Sissy, illustrating the horrors of white male supremacy, Southern style. It resonates even more today as we try to understand where this angry need to once again control women comes from. I had to wonder to what degree these were stories in some way Despres knew of or experienced growing up in Louisiana. But ultimately, Sissy's Scandalous Summer is about love. Parker, Sissy's high school sweetheart, and Sissy do finally get together and Sissy and Clara triumph over the male forces of darkness. It is, in its way, a happy ending. I further loved that Despres dropped in the possibility Sissy's evil son may have been responsible for Agent Orange’s use in Vietnam!
And finally, I was intrigued by Despres' references to antisemitism in the South. Despres' follow up to Sissy, The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell, is set in small town Louisiana in the 1920s, featuring Sissy's clamoring for independence grandmother, Belle. The Ku Klux Klan is part of the drama, a topic I'm interested in as I'm familiar with its machinations in Los Angeles during that time period. I look forward to discovering what Despres has to say about that organization's bad behavior and how it affected the likes of suffragette Belle.