“We’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them up in the attic. We bring ‘em right down to the living room and show ‘em off. No one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they’re on.” – Dixie Carter, known as “Julia Sugarbaker” of Designing Women.
For your copy or copies of “Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle,” published by Grateful Steps in Asheville, N.C., go to www.gratefulsteps.org available for pre-order with a 10 percent discount and FREE hilarious funeral-home-type fans for the first 100 orders. The novel is also available on Amazon, and independent bookstores should be able to order copies.
Extra shots from the “Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle” photo shoot by Randy Whittington
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR “CHIMES”:
You don’t have to be from the South to fall in love with Susan Reinhardt’s novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle. Reinhardt shows her fiction chops in this hilarious, offbeat and painfully accurate portrayal of one woman’s journey back to sanity in the South.
In the southern fried voice we’ve come to love from her memoirs, humor columnist Susan Reinhardt goes for the jugular with hilarity and a touch of key lime pie sweetness in her first novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle.
The South will rise again when fans of humor columnist Susan Reinhardt read this novel, assuming they can pick their jaws up off the floor and stop laughing long enough… -Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author, “Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir. How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs”
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Reinhardt creates such colorful, loveable and familiar characters, that we will look for them in our Crayola boxes. Then, when we discover the BRIGHTNESS, depth and breadth of the hues are not there, we understand that they were her discovery alone. She draws you into the narrative by scribbling the funniest lines outside of the box, in a tapestry of a story that can only be woven with her passion for telling it, a deft wit and a true understanding of the outrageous co-existences of family relationships. Relayed in her southern up-bringing conversational dialogue, even a Yankee will relate to the hysterical should-be-a-movie scenes, running rampant throughout the book. Reinhardt has spun a new color of gold with this one. – D.C. Stanfa, author of the award-winning “The Art of Table Dancing,” and “Fifty Shades of Funny: Hook-ups, Break-ups and Crack-ups.”
Susan Reinhardt’s Southern roots show in her debut novel. Reinhardt can pass my personal litmus test for humorists–crying so hard you can barely breathe, then laughing so hard you blow a snot bubble with your nose. -Robin O’ Bryant, author of best-selling Ketchup is a Vegetable and other Lies Moms Tell Themselves.
Here is a video of Susan’s infamous Sarah Palin impersonation!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susan Reinhardt is a syndicated columnist in Asheville, North Carolina, and is a graduate of the University of Georgia. A mother of two, Reinhardt has written three humorous bestsellers, including Not Tonight, Honey Wait ’til I’m a Size 6, now it it’s 7th printing, along with Book of the Year winner “Don’t Sleep with a Bubba.” She has also collaborated on numerous anthologies and is a popular speaker and Sarah Palin impersonator.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Most people think the reason Dee Millings, (a pretty good looking but slightly overweight wanna-be nurse), married the best looking man in the Carolinas who turned out to be a complete psycho and near-murderer, is because she was raised all wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and Dee , a 38-year-old heroine to root for, sets out on a path winding with loveable kooks, wanting to prove there is a great life on the other side of tragedy and an ex behind bars who continues to mail threatening letters from prison.
Dee’s new adventure to find the missing links as to why she can’t pick the right man or get her career going, begins two years after the crime spree that nearly stopped her heart and left her flat-lining.
She packs up her two young kids and settles in her parent’s South Carolina home town where she rents what her mother calls a “pitiful apartment” and deals with a delightful, but over-the-top mama who still pretends her grown daughters are virgins.
Lucinda Millings and her proper morals, begins each day ushering a slew of Proverbs, and is a stark contrast to her sister – Dee’s Aunt Weepie who lives to crash funerals just to get the covered-dish meals after the gravesides, no matter she has no idea who’s in the coffins. This is the same wild aunt who enjoys nothing better than dry martinis sipped from the nest she created beneath her four-poster bed, the bold relative who ends up making a daring decision that could change Dee’s life forever.
Dee finds new purpose for herself, her kids and discovers love where she never excepted it: in a nursing home where she tends to the likes of 104-year-old Annie Sue who still drives and has a hankering for cold draft beer and fixing her hair up like the celebs in the gossip rags.
As Dee begins a journey toward mental recovering and becoming a registered nurse, the hijinks of her aunt, mother and the residents at the nursing home prove just the medicine to soothe her once-damaged soul, allowing a terrible secret to resurface, one that if handled right, could be her ticket to love again.
