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.