The Next Step in the Dance, by Tim Gautreaux

This audiobook was obtained from NetLibrary.com through the Alachua County Public Library. This book was 11 hours and 42 minutes long, and was narrated by Vernel Bagneris.

Paul and Colette Thibodeaux are a young married couple in an insular Cajun community called Tiger Island. Paul is a talented machinist who is happy with his work and just as happy to play his accordion and dance up a storm at the local pub. Colette is beautiful and bored, and deeply annoyed with her husband's contentment. One day she finds and excuse to leave him, and she makes her way to Los Angeles. She finds work similar to what she did at the bank back home, except there is more opportunity for advancement. She's smart, hard-working, and the boss likes her, so she is doing well when Paul decides to follow her. He is cool enough to give her some space, and he finds a job for his unique talents and he is doing well, too.

But not all that glitters is gold. They are both working for unscrupulous creeps, so they both end up returning to Tiger Island just after the jobs have all dried up. They are still separated, but now Colette is pregnant, care of a weak moment with Paul while they were living in California.

The hits just keep coming before they ever work it all out. It's a good story, but it seems to come from a different time. Paul seems way older than 24, and Colette does not seem like 23. They just seem so middle aged in their attitudes and demeanor. It was a big distraction that pecked away at the story's credulity. It had its good moments, but it was a little more work to read than I like a book to be. 2 stars.

One Mississippi, by Mark Childress

This audiobook was obtained from NetLibrary.com, through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 13 hours and 17 minutes long and was narrated by Jeff Woodman.

Daniel Musgrove gets to start his life over in Mississippi after his father is transferred to a new territory. Changing high schools is bad enough, but downgrading from Indiana to Mississippi is excruciating. But then he finds a friend, a local outcast named Tim Cousins.

It's 1973, and their high school is about to elect its first black prom queen. It's also the night that Tim and Daniel take a couple of girls to the prom, and Daniel gets his first kiss. After bringing their dates home, they accidentally hit the new queen, who was riding home on her bicycle. They flee in terror, come back to see that their nemesis, a popular jock and bully, is getting busted for it after stopping to see if she is alright. They let him hang, and when she comes to, she has a colorblind brand of amnesia: she thinks she is white.

The lunacy just keeps coming. This was very, very funny book, but it takes some very, very dark turns. Funny, thought-provoking, sad, disturbing: it gets a star for each, which makes 4 altogether.

Fay, by Larry Brown

This audiobook was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was 17 hours and 24 minutes long, and was narrated by Tom Stechschulte.

Fay is pretty while trailer trash living in an abusive home situation. Her story begins with her deciding to go feral with only 2 dollars tucked in her bra. She is 17, vulnerable, and brings out the worst in men. Even the kind and well-intentioned Mississippi State Trooper Sam Harris is sucked into the vortex of sex and violence that is attendant in her life. Although she cannot be blamed for most of what happens, she does change the climate wherever she saunters.

This is a somewhat depressing story of bad choices colliding with bad luck. But it's sense that redemption is just within reach keeps you involved with characters for whom you can want it.

I can't put my finger on what keeps this from being a four star book, but I can only give it 3 and 1/2.

The Florabama Ladies' Auxiliary & Sewing Circle, by Lois Battle

This book was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was 13 hours and 37 minutes long, and was narrated by Christine McMurdo-Wallis.

In Florabama, Alabama a lingerie manufacturer is moving offshore and leaving its hourly workforce behind. These are mostly women, and their best hope is a loophole a Displaced Homemakers program at the local community college.

In another part of Alabama, Bonnie Duke Cullman, a well-bred, comfortable woman and upper crust homemaker, discovers that her emotionally distant husband has made a train wreck of their finances. Their divorce leaves her without a rich husband to sue for alimony. She ends up taking a job with the community college in Florabama as the director of the Displaced Homemakers program. The difference between Bonnie and her educationally disadvantaged charges is that she has a rich father who was able to pull the strings needed to get her the job to begin with.

I expected her differences with the laid off ladies to breed discontent, but their differences among them have prepared them for life's discrepancies. Hilly Pruit and Ruth Elkins are next-door neighbors and close friends, even though Hilly is a bar-hopping red-head out of a country song, and Ruth is a quiet church-goer keeping her wayward daughter's brood of rug-rats.

Bonnie's connections and high-priced worldview come in handy as she matches her boutique connections to the ladies' skills, and convinces them that there is a market for Jane Austen era party dresses for little girls. And she is right. But that does not keep disaster from striking just as a glimmer of hope appears.

Characters trump story and this is a chick flick waiting to happen. Too much of a soap opera and too many missed opportunities to be 4 stars, but it's easily worth 3.

The Summer We Got Saved, by Pat Cunningham Devoto

This audiobook was free from NetLibrary.com, was 12 hours and 53 minutes long, and was narrated by Katie Firth.

Tina and her younger sister, Tab, are part of a southern family in the 1960's that is collectively ambivalent about its connection with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The older members are proud and defensive of their heritage. Tab and Tina are more concerned about makeup and the pecking order at the malt shop. The girls' father, Charles, is hoping the coming changes will happen smoothly and gradually. The girls' aunt Eugenia is a flaming civil rights activist, and she is here on her annual, excruciating family visit.

Eugenia proposes to take the girls to visit some other distant relative for a week, and the other adults are relieved to let her go. What no one realizes is that Eugenia actually plans on taking the girls to the Highlander Folk School, a training camp for union and civil rights activists since 1932.

A parallel story involves Maudie, a childhood friend of the girls who went to Tuskegee Institute for polio rehabilitation, and is now running a voter education program at a black Missionary Baptist Church. She is not entirely welcome there. Blacks in the community don't all get it, and see this activism as a nuisance that will only draw fire from the local rednecks. It's an uphill struggle for Maudie, who fits in with no group. She is the "crippled girl" and is treated with derision by the young "cotton girls" who live to drink and carouse.

Tab's clueless innocence isn't quite ruined by what she has learned by participating in a sit-in at a Woolworth's counter. After all, she gets to go home from all of this. But she will never simply parrot the family lore any more. It's not that she thinks it isn't real. She has simply encountered something more real.

I gravitate toward stories like these because I lived through the Civil Rights Era on television. It simply was not an issue in my town, and in my school. I never went to a segregated school. My Boy Scout troop was integrated, but we never thought about it as such. I had an African-American History class in the 6th grade (1969), and it was a real immersion into the incredible injustices that were perpetrated in the past. It made me wonder if people in the South were actually human. Now I live here, and sometimes feel like I am not in on the secrets. I think I may have gotten a few clues from this engaging story. It gets 4 stars from me.

The Rabbit Factory, by Larry Brown

This novel was a free download from NetLibrary.com, was 12 hours and 23 minutes long, narrated by Tom Stechschulte, and was the author's last novel (2003) before he died.

If you are a fan of Carl Hiaasen, you will love this book. It reads like a collision of Southern short stories about flawed people having moments of nobility, with sometimes hilarious results.

A rich septuagenarian with performance issues is trying to hold on to his hot young wife with kindness and a love of old movies. A young hooker is doing community service in a nursing home when she brains an abusive nurse with a metal pitcher after watching her slap an old man around. Now she is on the run from the law. An ex-con is driving a truckload of dope and frozen meat for a mobster when he hits a deer. It's a big deer, and he likes venison, so he stops to put it in the back of his refrigerated truck. When he opens it up, he finds that some of the meat he is hauling looks like body parts. Just then a police car pulls off the road behind him...and he acts rashly, shall we say.

There is more than this going on, so you won't be bored. Not every thread is neatly tied off; at least, not the way we'd like it. But it is entertaining and the characters are largely likable. It gets 3 stars.