The Sweetest Thing

This week, the
Christian Fiction Blog Alliance
is introducing
The Sweetest Thing Bethany House (June 1, 2011)
by
Elizabeth Musser


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Musser, an Atlanta native, studied English and French literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. While at Vanderbilt, she had the opportunity to spend a semester in Aix-en-Provence, France.

During her Senior year at Vanderbilt, she attended a five-day missions conference for students and discovered an amazing thing: God had missionaries in France, and she felt God calling her there. After graduation, she spent eight months training for the mission field in Chicago, Illinois and then two years serving in a tiny Protestant church in Eastern France where she met her future husband.

Elizabeth lives in southern France with her husband and their two sons. She find her work as a mother, wife, author and missionary filled with challenges and chances to see God’s hand at work daily in her life. Inspiration for her novels come both from her experiences growing up in Atlanta as well as through the people she meets in her work in France. Many conversations within her novels are inspired from real-life conversations with skeptics and seekers alike.

Her acclaimed novel, The Swan House, was a Book Sense bestseller list in the Southeast and was selected as one of the top Christian books for 2001 by Amazon's editors. Searching for Eternity is her sixth novel.


ABOUT THE BOOK

Compelling Southern Novel Explores Atlanta Society in the 1930s.


The Singleton family’s fortunes seem unaffected by the Great Depression, and Perri—along with the other girls at Atlanta’s elite Washington Seminary—lives a life of tea dances with college boys and matinees at the cinema. When tragedy strikes, Perri is confronted with a world far different from the one she has always known.


At the insistence of her parents, Mary ‘Dobbs’ Dillard, the daughter of an itinerant preacher, is sent from inner-city Chicago to live with her aunt and attend Washington Seminary. Dobbs, passionate, fiercely individualistic and deeply religious, enters Washington Seminary as a bull in a china shop and shocks the girls with her frank talk about poverty and her stories of revival on the road. Her arrival intersects at the point of Perri’s ultimate crisis, and the tragedy forges an unlikely friendship.


The Sweetest Thing tells the story of two remarkable young women—opposites in every way—fighting for the same goal: surviving tumultuous change. Just as the Great Depression collides disastrously with Perri's well-ordered life, friendship blossoms--a friendship that will be tested by jealousy, betrayal, and family secrets...


If you would like to read the first chapter of The Sweetest Thing, go HERE.

MY THOUGHTS:
Some novels are to be read. Others are to be experienced. The Sweetest Thing is one of those which will sweep you into its pages and gently set you down in Atlanta in the frighteningly uncertain days of the 1930's. Elizabeth Musser has penned a novel that is rich in detail as she depicts the many facets of life as experienced by Perri and Dobbs. A variety of themes are woven throughout this story--wealth and poverty, friendship, legalism, heartache, fear, prejudice, trust, and most importantly, faith and love--and the result is a beautiful tale that will leave you both extremely satisfied as you turn the final page and reluctant to reach the conclusion.

I am honored that I will have the opportunity to meet and interview Elizabeth Musser next month in Atlanta at the ICRS. What a pleasure it will be to visit with her in the city where she was raised and which forms the backdrop for this delightful book!

If you are looking for a great summer read, this is a wonderful choice!

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