Book challenge 2015, category "A book by an author you have not read before".

Well, that wasn't exactly a difficult category, every other author I read is a new one. I'm pleased to have become acquainted with Lynne Bryant. My only regret is that I did not read this in English, because the Norwegian translation was clumsy and idiosyncratic. I had a few "wait a minute, I think she actually means..." This disturbed my fluency of reading, but I still recognized the quality of the original story.

Avery's been away from home for 10 years, have raised her bi-racial daughter in Colorado. Now her little brother Mark is getting married and she is invited to the wedding. As a matter of fact, Mark's fiancee wants both Avery and her daughter Celi as bridemaids. After much deliberation Avery decides to indeed return to her mother's crisp white Mississippi of country clubs and debutant balls. One of the reason she returns is to find out how her daughter can have sickle cell anemia, an illness which only affects blacks and must be inherited from both parents.

There are lots of family secrets to ferret out. The story braids in past and present smoothly, but because the past timeline occurs in the 1940's, 1960's and 1990's, this causes confusion at times.

The other thing that confuses my European mind is how prevalent racism still is, at least as portrayed in this book. I had several moments of shock, wondering if things could really be as bad as that in this day and age.

All in all this is a fairly typical family saga/ chick lit sort of read. Not bad as such and definitely a nice change from the rather more blood dripping genres I usually engage in.

Didn't want to put this one down... Which is why I am at work with bags under my eyes and extra coffee. It is sad to know that his book is set recent times and the struggles for some are so prominent in their lives. I can't imagine.

What an entertaing and thought provoking novel about race relations as it expands over several generations in a small Mississippi town. I love the overall story. I would say this is a must read and has bee added as one of my all time favorites.

I think this book was great because it highlighted racism in the south now. It's one thing to read books about ignorant people set in the past, but these blatant racist acts happened in the last 10 years.

Wow. wow wow wow. If you have to choose between this or "The Help," read this. hands down.

Alligator Lake is an enjoyable story about life and race in a small Mississippi town, as told by three generations of white women: Avery, the single mother of a mixed-race daughter who left home after getting pregnant and has come back for the first time in ten years; Marion, Avery's mother who is struggling to reconcile the return of her daughter and granddaughter with her views on the importance of being white; and Will, Marion's mother and a civil rights activist who tends to socialize with the "wrong" people.

The story deals with each woman's struggles with both personal issues and outside influences, and one thing that the book does really well is to show how past experiences have shaped these women through use of flashbacks. While the obvious thing would be to paint Marion as the villain, the author doesn't take the easy way out - instead we get to see why her views on the importance of race have become so different from her mother's and daughter's.

Aside from keeping the characters from being one-dimensional, the author also did a great job of creating an image of southern culture. I found myself, like Avery's daughter Celi, wondering what tomato gravy tastes like or how an earworm looks (although I could go without seeing one of those, actually). Like the characters, the town of Greendale cannot be described simply as "that racist place". Yes, there are major race issues that are the main focus of the story, but there is some good too.

Overall, I think what makes this a good book is that the author is able to capture the emotions of the characters so well. It is a very character-driven and setting-driven story, and even though there isn't much action or surprises, the story doesn't need these to keep us reading. The only (minor) complaint I have is the conclusion - plotwise it was fine, but for some reason it read a little bit too much like the conclusion to a writing assignment or something. Maybe it was too much like the final "summary and future ideas" paragraph of a paper? Anyway, this in no way takes away from the story, which I was very satisfied with. Thank you, Goodreads giveaways and Lynne Bryant!

This was a really good book! I randomly picked up this book not knowing much about it, and I'm glad I did. It was well written, and covered a number of serious topics that drew me in. I just wish we found out a little bit more at the end... did Holt ever end up telling Marion? (By the way, I totally didn't see that coming somehow) How often did Celi get to see her father, etc. Overall though it was a great book.

So beautiful, and so hard to put down!
It was interesting to the last page.