I mentioned on Natter a few days ago that I'm doing a couple of reviews for the All About Romance website's Desert Isle Keeper page. Here's my first attempt at a draft. My goal is both to get people to read a book I love, and to showcase myself as a good writer. I want to use this as a clip when I set up my freelancing homepage in a few months. Any suggestions for improvement, or praise for what I'm doing right?

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Raney is a Southern novel, but don’t look for gracious antebellum mansions surrounded by magnolias and populated by society matrons and belles. This is the Appalachian South, the South of pine trees and Baptist churches, where accents twang instead of drawl. And Clyde Edgerton nails the voice of the region exactly. I should know—I grew up in that world.

The year is 1975. Raney opens on the eve of the wedding of Raney Bell and Charles Shepherd, a young couple drawn together by their mutual love for bluegrass music. Otherwise, they are a study in contrasts. Raney is a child of the rural North Carolina area in which the novel is set, while Charles is a well-educated young man from Atlanta drawn to the area by a job in the community college library. Raney is Free Will Baptist; Charles is Episcopalian. She is theologically and socially conservative, and more than a little racist (though it’s clear that her attitudes spring from ignorance rather than malice). He has the typical beliefs of a liberal of the 1970’s. She values her close-knit family circle, while he craves his privacy. Raney is the story of how these attracted opposites build a workable marriage.

One of the many beauties of this book is the way Clyde Edgerton takes two characters who could easily be caricatures and instead turns them into believable, sympathetic human beings. Also, he never allows either Raney or Charles to be totally in the right. While I almost always agreed with him, I found Charles’s liberal sanctimoniousness just as exasperating as Raney’s Old South traditionalism. And if you’ve ever been in a long-term relationship, you’ll recognize the petty bickering over the right way to wash the dishes as well as the deeper conflicts that arise from attempting to blend contrasting family lifestyles and traditions.

The secondary characters are also vividly real, from Charles’s big city liberal vegetarian mother to Raney’s shattered, struggling World War II veteran Uncle Nate. In particular, the women of Raney’s family are at once a supportive community and a force of nature.

While it has many serious moments and a few heartbreaking ones, Raney is fundamentally a humorous book. It’s the best kind of humor, too—it grows from Raney’s naïve yet quirky worldview, and from character interaction. You may laugh at Raney and Charles rather than with them on some occasions, but it will be the wry laughter of recognizing in them the same human foibles you and your own friends and family share.

But what truly makes this novel shine is Raney herself, as the first-person narrator. Some samples:

Raney on her wedding night:
Well, I’m not a prude. Getting drunk at your wedding is one thing, but I can understand a little private celebration, maybe—as a symbol of something wonderful happening. Something symbolic. So I didn’t say anything about the champagne. It’s very hard to find fault on your wedding night with a dozen red roses staring you full in the face—even though a still, small voice was warning me.

Raney on her first visit to an Episcopal church:
The priest had a yellow robe with a butterfly on the back. Now that is plumb sacrilegious if you ask me. A house of worship is no place to play Halloween….I was a little nervous about drinking real wine in church. But when I thought about it I ended up figuring maybe that was the best place to do it and God would forgive me….I want you to know the priest gulped down every bit that was left over at the end. That was an education to me.

One caveat: Raney and her relatives use the n-word regularly. It’s a realistic portrayal of how many rural Southerners spoke and thought twenty or thirty years ago, but it might make some readers uncomfortable.

Give Raney a try if you’re looking for a read that’s at once a lighthearted love story and a stunningly accurate portrayal of human nature as hammered out in the first years of a marriage.

I like it Susan. Far more than I liked Raney, but then I have issues with "southern lit."

I'd put the direct quotes from the book in quotation marks. The way you have it looks sort of like it might be dialog in a screenplay or play.

No dash in final sentence of first para. A comma is sufficient, or if you want more emphasis a period would be better. And 3rd and 4th paras, does Charles', possessive, have a final s? Charles'. Charles's. I think it's without.

It's well-written, a little tantalizing, just what a review of a book you liked should be.

Do you write reviews for your local paper's book page? If not, it's a place to start. Is there a local trade & tourist magazine (usually pulp) for your city or area? They often have book reviews, too. They may not pay anything but a reading copy of the book, but it looks good on your resume, and can be an intro to other writing assignments if they like your work. Just a thought.

If I run across Raney I will definitely give it a read....

I like it Susan. Far more than I liked Raney, but then I have issues with "southern lit."

Interestingly, Edgerton is the only "southern lit" I've run across that I've liked. Everything else I've tried seems all portentous, like somehow being Southern is fraught with incredible meaning and significance in a way that being Western or Yankee isn't.

Overuse of the em dash is one of the verbal tics I'm trying to eradicate. I'll certainly get rid of that one. As for Charles' vs. Charles's, I know Strunk & White say it's the latter, but I should probably actually crack open that AP style manual I bought a few weeks ago and see what the current usage is.

I haven't tried to write reviews for a local paper yet, but it's on my list of things to try soon. My goal is to do a few things like this review and write for my church newsletter between now and the end of the year, and then start submitting to markets that actually pay come January.

Thanks for the feedback!

As for Charles' vs. Charles's, I know Strunk & White say it's the latter, but I should probably actually crack open that AP style manual I bought a few weeks ago and see what the current usage is.

I believe s's is British. But I'm not sure. It's certainly not common where I see it.

Now, I've been told that s' is proper and British, and s's is American and therefore wrong. Certainly in Bridget Jones' Diary they use s'.

I've always been taught that s's is correct except for Moses' and Jesus'. (I just checked the Little, Brown Handbook, which agrees with that and also adds that if the same is a plural already, like Rivers, then it just becomes Rivers'.)

I've always been taught that s's is correct except for Moses' and Jesus'. (I just checked the Little, Brown Handbook, which agrees with that and also adds that if the same is a plural already, like Rivers, then it just becomes Rivers'.)

How very, very strange. Why was I taught that? It *was* a Catholic school, and "Jesus" *was* one of the examples.... Why do Jesus and Moses have honorary plurality, just because they're shiny?

Certainly in Bridget Jones' Diary they use s'.

Nuh-uh. At least in the version here in the US, it's "Jones's"

Why do Jesus and Moses have honorary plurality, just because they're shiny?

Try saying Moses's or Jesus's. Your tongue gets stuck in a sort of Moseseseseses thing. It's because of the double s already at the end.