In 1968 Mother won’t let Bezellia go on her high school’s trip to Paris because the chaperone is Father’s mistress. Soon Bezellia and Samuel form a special friendship, but the adults separate them. In 1965, when Bezellia is 14, Nathaniel’s son Samuel comes to work with his father. Bezellia and her younger sister Adelaide survive their upbringing thanks mainly to their saintly black servants: live-in maid Maizelle and chauffeur-grounds man Nathaniel. Father is a spineless womanizer who pays little attention to his wife and children before his suspicious but accidental death. Originally from a more modest background, Mother is a shallow, racist social climber who veers between ignoring and abusing her two daughters as she slides into alcoholism and mental illness. The Groves are one of Nashville’s oldest, most prominent families, but under the proper gentility lurks Southern gothic dysfunction. Gilmore ( Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, 2008) concocts a poor-little-rich-girl story set in civil-rights–era Nashville.
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