‘A Place To Call Home’ Southern Storytelling At Its Best

“A Place to Call Home” By Deborah Smith (Bantam, $23.95)

Rarely will a book touch your heart like “A Place to Call Home.”

So sit back, put your feet up and enjoy. Georgia author Deborah Smith’s quintessential Southern story is set in the fictional North Georgia mountain town of Dunderry. Told through the eyes of 10-year-old Claire Maloney, Dunderry is about “an inch and a half above Atlanta” on the map.

Claire is the pampered only daughter of a large Irish brood and is kin to the original settlers of Dunderry.

She realizes early in life that there’s a special bond between herself and lonely, 15-year-old outsider Roanie Sullivan, son of the town drunk. But the two soul mates are separated by Claire’s worried parents, and the story picks up again 20 years later.

This is Southern storytelling at its best, with a rich assortment of Irish relatives thrown in.

The feuding grandmothers include Great-Gran Alice Stonewall McGinnis Maloney, whose name Stonewall “suited her aura of command, especially the way she drove a car.” Then there’s Grandmother Elizabeth who had to camp out one night when Grandpa Joseph’s car broke down on the way to Atlanta, and “a moonshiner drunk on his own corn whiskey crept out of the bushes and offered to buy her from Grandpa for two dollars and a jug.”

Readers must look through layers of memories and half-truths to get to the real story.

Roanie’s bittersweet homecoming must open old wounds before his and Claire’s healing can truly begin.