
First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea – it’s is a weekly meme where you share the first paragraph (or two) from a book you are considering reading.
My pick this week is Mermaids in the Basement by Michael Lee West.
I had a Michael Lee West binge fifteen years ago and exhausted all that she’d written – my memories were of stories set in the Deep South focused around female relationships – think Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and more recently, The Help. I was unpacking some old boxes a few months ago and came across a couple of Lee West novels and was reminded of how much I had enjoyed them. It prompted me to seek out a few more, including Mermaids in the Basement and Consuming Passions that I’ve earmarked for the Foodies Reading Challenge. Mermaids begins with this –
“If I had not read the cover story in the March 2, 2000, National Enquirer, it’s doubtful that I would have gone to Alabama and ruined my daddy’s engagement party, much less sent the bride-to-be into a coma. Just for the record, I don’t go around hitting other women, even if they are all wrong for my daddy; I don’t read tabloids, and I certainly would never steal one, yet that’s exactly what happened.”
Intrigued?