Lee Smith is a North Carolina treasure who has been writing Southern Fiction for over 30 years. In her new novella, she takes her readers to Key West and her descriptive writing made me feel like I was there. The main character is 13 years old and most of the story is told through her dialogue which is sometimes funny, sometime sad but always spot on.

The story starts in the summer that Jenny turns 13. She likes to spy on people and when she finds out interesting tidbits, she writes them in her Davy Crockett spiral notebook. "I would use this stuff later in my novels." Her mother is a beautiful woman who loves to read about movie stars and knows all about their lives. Her father is a lawyer and a respected man in town so when Jenny finds out that he is having an affair (she found out by spying on Carroll Byrd who was very different than the rest of the women in town), she knows that she can't tell her mother so doesn't know what to do. Her mother, of course, finds out and the family goes on a trip to Key West to try to resolve their problems. When they check into their hotel in Key West (Blue Marlin) they find out that many movie stars are staying there as they film Operation Petticoat.
Jenny is able to meander all over Key West and makes some interesting friends along the way. The book is full of humor but also sadness as Jenny tries to help her parents reconcile. Seeing the world, no matter how ugly it can be, through Jenny's eyes is a real treat and makes this book well worth reading. ( )

3.5 A lightheaded breath of Southern air. Which after reading about murder, gulags and East Germany, I desperately needed.

Our narrator is a young girl, who loves to spy on people. Of course she sees things she shouldn't, one of which affects her own family. As a young child she is cosseted and used to doing whatever she feels. This will change too.

Her observations and descriptions are often amusing, some wise beyond her years. She and her mother share a love of movie and the stars that make them. This is a nostalgic time period, when the box office and movie magazines were all the rage. Big stars like Tony Curtis and Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, whose movie, marriages and divorces were big news.

The little family end up in Key West, under less than ideal circumstances, staying at the, yep, Blue Marlin Motel. What they find there is something that actually happened in Smith's own life.

Autobiographical fiction and s fun read, of a time gone by. Lee Smith describes in her afterward how this book mimicked her own life.

ARC from Edelweiss ( )