JUST ANOTHER GEORGIA ROMANCE

The Book Beulah, Georgia, 1951, the leather back seat of a tulip-yellow Studebaker—therefrom springs the story of four romances from four generations so impassioned as to change lives and to endure lifetimes; indeed, to endure still; to repeat, blossom, succeed, as everyone, everywhere, awaits Just Another Georgia Romance. This short novel allows no single of its four love stories to stand alone, though each is so singular, so intensely personal. The central one—begotten by the other three—tells of Natalie Merrywell and Blake Davis who meet upon the floor of the Merrywell Tobacco Auction Warehouse one sweltering August afternoon. They do not remotely know the secrets they carry as they fall more deeply in love from the moment of their first encounter to novel’s very end. Nonetheless, neither the Montagues nor the Capulets of Shakespeare’s pen hold an edge up on the aversion the Merrywell and Davis families experience when they discover the love between their handsome and talented offspring. They fail to realize that their mandate to end this modern-day relationship comes much too late; that it cannot be ended, only stilled.