Full name: The Book of Polly: A Novel

Author: Kathy Hepinstall Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fiction, Humor Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780399562099 0399562095

Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late fifties when Willow was born, so Willow knows she's here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow's father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere. It's just her and bigger-than-life Polly. Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and especially Polly's life pre-Willow. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, fifty years ago and vow never to return? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun the Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her past? Similar books: The Fairy Gunmother by Daniel Pennac Riotous Assembly by Tom Sharpe Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe Missing Links by Rick Reilly The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna Nuclear Family by Susanna Fogel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico Amp'd by Ken Pisani Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton Jeeves and the Impending Doom by P. G. Wodehouse The Front Porch Prophet by Raymond L. Atkins Up and Down by Terry Fallis High Society by Ben Elton Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast by Bill Richardson Raney by Clyde Edgerton The End of the Road by Tom Bodett Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe The Throwback by Tom Sharpe Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanna Elden