The Sweet Taste of Muscadines @pamelaandedward @penguinballantine #family #rediscovery @absltmom

Love, love, love this story! Flowery language and all, it was a definite winner in my “book”. The story was touching, understandable and the result of a secret uncovered that would impact the lives of many.

A mother, Geneva Bruce, has died and the family is to come home. Lila Bruce Breedlove, her brother Henry, and their younger sister are once again all in the small town they were raised in, Wesleyan, Georgia. It’s a town where gossip flies and secrets abound but not such a huge secret that Lila and her twin brother Henry are about to learn. Their mother, Geneva, wife to a Baptist minister who died suddenly while in service in Vietnam as a chaplain, is a tough, demanding woman, so tough in fact that no tears were shed at their father’s memorial service. She never was close to her children except for the youngest daughter, so when time allowed both Lila and Henry escaped to other places far from Wesleyan.

However, home they are now and confronted with an enormous lie that was told to them so many years ago. It is a lie that sends their lives into a search that impacts their lives in ways they never imagined. They never pictured themselves searching for the truth, or on board a plane headed to Scotland, but life always has a funny ironic way of handing us a curve that for a times sends us spiraling out of our depth.

They often say that family secrets tend to come out at funerals and for this family, that is certainly true. As in my own family, when my grandmother passed, we, the grandchildren, all learned a family secret that many of our ancestors took to their graves. So afraid, so ashamed, so embarrassed that they let a lie linger and grow!

This touching story had true to life characters that were able to touch my heart and make me see that secrets kept are often the ones that hurt most deeply. In its own way, it is a tale of what once was, and now, through a changing world has become better. It was a story of how family can break apart, but then come once again to the realization that it is love, trust, and the truth that ultimately binds one to another.

Muscadines do have a sweet taste but for the characters in this story that taste is bittersweet for a time, but then the lovely vines produce that sweet grape they once loved.

and here’s the author:

A lifelong Southerner, Pamela Terry learned the power of storytelling at a very early age. For the past decade, Terry has been the author of the internationally popular blog From the House of Edward, which was named one of the top ten home blogs of the year by London’s The Telegraph. She lives in Smyrna, Georgia, with her songwriter husband, Pat, and their three dogs, Apple, Andrew, and George. She travels to the Scottish Highlands as frequently as possible and is currently at work on her second novel.