Dear Reader by Kim Boykin

The Writer’s Life newest feature, Dear Reader, gives authors a chance to talk to their readers - YOU!

Today's guest is Kim Boykin, author of the southern women's fiction, A Peach of a Pair.

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Dear Reader,

I have friends who only had brothers growing up or were onlies who always wanted sisters. I was luck enough to have two, five and six years older than me. Sometimes felt sorry for my dad being the only guy in the house, and never getting a word in edgewise. My sisters and I fussed and fought and loved each other to bits as only sisters can. And then came the girls in my life who weren’t blood kin, but we were so close, they might as well have been my sisters.

That’s what A Peach of a Pair is about. To be more accurate, It’s about “an indestructible sisterhood” between our heroine, Nettie Gilbert and her sister, Sissy, and the elderly pair of spinster sisters, Emily and Lurleen. When the story opens, Nettie and Sissy’s sisterhood is torn apart when Nettie receives an invitation to her baby sister’s wedding back home, only Nettie’s own fiance is the groom. It’s a horrible betrayal that cuts so deep, Nettie can’t begin to fathom how to repair the breech.

She’s so distraught by Sissy’s impending wedding and bun in the oven, she quits school two month shy of graduation and goes to work for two elderly spinster sisters, Emily and Lurleen, who know a thing or two about a falling out over a man.

Emily had a hand in a horrible accident that took away Lurleen’s first and last love. Lurleen lived in the same house with Emily but didn’t speak to her for seven years after the accident. By the time she did start speaking to Emily, the two sisters had also lost their mother, and their brother had runaway from home. At the point in the book when Lurleen is trying to help Nettie find forgiveness for her sister, Lurleen says, “Nettie had given Emily and Lurleen so much and she didn’t even know it. Then Lurleen had meddled perhaps where she shouldn’t have. She’d put this idea of an indestructible sisterhood in Nettie’s head, and Nettie had bought it hook, line, sinker, and half the pole because she wanted to. Needed to. Right now, Lurleen wasn’t even sure there was such a thing.”

But it turns out sisterhood in my life, in my friends’ lives, in the lives of Nettie and her sister, and Emily and Lurleen, really is indestructible. It’s been dinged and damaged, and in one instance, darn near obliterated. Should have been obliterated, and yet it exists and thrives.

It’s my hope that you’ll take this very wild ride through a broken relationship to forgiveness that begins and ends with a cross country trip to see a faith healer on a Greyhound bus. And my wish is that you cherish the indestructible sisterhoods within you own life.

Cheers,

Kim Boykin

About the Author

Kim Boykin was raised in her South Carolina home with two girly sisters and great parents. She had a happy, boring childhood, which sucks if you’re a writer because you have to create your own crazy. PLUS after you’re published and you’re being interviewed, it’s very appealing when the author actually lived in Crazy Town or somewhere in the general vicinity.

Almost everything she learned about writing, she learned from her grandpa, an oral storyteller, who was a master teacher of pacing and sensory detail. He held court under an old mimosa tree on the family farm, and people used to come from all around to hear him tell stories about growing up in rural Georgia and share his unique take on the world.

As a stay-at-home mom, Kim started writing, grabbing snip-its of time in the car rider line or on the bleachers at swim practice. After her kids left the nest, she started submitting her work, sold her first novel at 53, and has been writing like crazy ever since.

Thanks to the lessons she learned under that mimosa tree, her books are well reviewed and, according to RT Book Reviews, feel like they’re being told across a kitchen table. She is the author of A Peach of a Pair, Palmetto Moon and The Wisdom of Hair from Berkley/NAL/Penguin; Flirting with Forever, She’s the One, Just in Time for Christmas, Steal Me, Cowboy and Sweet Home Carolina from Tule. While her heart is always in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, she lives in Charlotte and has a heart for hairstylist, librarians, and book junkies like herself.

Her latest book is the southern women’s fiction, A Peach of a Pair.

For More Information

Visit Kim Boykin’s website.
Connect with Kim on Facebook and Twitter.
Find out more about Kim at Goodreads.
Contact Kim.

About the Book:

Title: A Peach of a Pair
Author: Kim Boykin
Publisher: Penguin Random House/Berkley Books
Pages: 304
Genre: Southern Women’s Fiction

"Palmetto Moon" inspired "The Huffington Post" to rave, It is always nice to discover a new talented author and Kim Boykin is quite a find. Now, she delivers a novel of a woman picking up the pieces of her life with the help of two spirited, elderly sisters in South Carolina.

April, 1953. Nettie Gilbert has cherished her time studying to be a music teacher at Columbia College in South Carolina, but as graduation approaches, she can’t wait to return to her family and her childhood sweetheart, Brooks, in Alabama. But just days before her senior recital, she gets a letter from her mama telling her that Brooks is getting married . . . to her own sister.

Devastated, Nettie drops out of school and takes a job as live-in help for two old-maid sisters, Emily and Lurleen Eldridge. Emily is fiercely protective of the ailing Lurleen, but their sisterhood has weathered many storms. And as Nettie learns more about their lives on a trip to see a faith healer halfway across the country, she’ll discover that love and forgiveness will one day lead her home.