From Publishers Weekly
Freddie, Eleanor and Jo-Nell McBroom may be the most satisfyingly trio of off-center Southern sisters since Crimes of the Heart, and West (Crazy Ladies) delivers a bawdy and poignant novel to match. When marine biologist Freddie McBroom fled Tallulah, Tenn. (after an unfortunate incident involving a stolen heart and gallbladder that got her booted from med school), she swore she'd never return. But now her rowdy sister Jo-Nell, after drinking just a bit too much tequila at the Starlight Lounge, has been hit by the midnight train. Reluctantly, Freddie decides to return home, leaving her husband, Sam, and his blonde, bikini-wearing assistant at their research site in Baja California. Ridiculous disasters have stalked the family for a while now. Grandmother Minerva Pray buried two young children before her husband was killed by lightning. The McBroom girls' mother was found hanging from the Venetian blinds?by eldest sister Eleanor, who subsequently became a semi-agoraphobic and now spends much of her time updating a scrapbook of grisly accidents and murders. Jo-Nell's first husband died in an unfortunate watermelon accident. A bittersweet reunion allows all three sisters to have a second look and a second chance at life: Freddie has a fling with her former fiance; Jo-Nell contemplates leaving both Tallulah and her reputation behind; and Eleanor confronts her deepest fears. If these gals are a bit too resilient, if no tragedy or mishap sticks too long to their Teflon-coated spirits, that doesn't diminish the charm as West travels effortlessly between the deep-fried South and the arugula-strewn Pacific coast, giving full voice to the McBrooms as they try to sweep their troubles away. $35,000 ad/promo; author tour; U.K., translation, first serial and dramatic rights: Ellen Levine Agency. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Freddie is the smart sister who has left the sleepy town of Tallulah, Tennessee, and now studies whales off Baja California. Eleanor is the dependable homebody who bakes pies and slumps to hide her drab looks. Jo-Nell is the wild one, going from man to man and bar to bar. Then Jo-Nell is hit by a train, and as the family pulls together to save her, their lives are altered radically. Jo-Nell rallies, announcing that she wants to leave town, but Freddie stumbles. Feeling out of place in Tallaulah from the moment she returned, she worries that husband Sam is having an affair but then starts one of her own. Grandmother Minerva is rushed to the hospital after fainting and as she lies in bed gently muses, "My girls was at the crossroads. One was coming, one was going, and one was getting left behind." In this engaging, readable work, full of well-delineated characters, West (She Flew the Coop, LJ 6/15/95) successfully captures the little tensions between sisters and the ties that bind them. Recommended for popular collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Jo-Nell McBroom heads out of the parking lot of the Starlight Lounge in a wheezy yellow Volkswagen, precariously balancing a tequila sunrise between her knees. Because she's paying more attention to her drinking than her driving, she fails to notice that she's fast approaching some railroad tracks and an oncoming train. She miraculously survives the accident, which serves as a summons home for her long-departed sister Freddie. No strangers to tragedy (the family resumeincludes suicide, electrocution, and drowning), the McBroom sisters cope with trauma in different ways: Jo-Nell has married so many times that her full name sounds like a law firm; Freddie has become an all-too-serious scholar with a string of college degrees; and third sister Eleanor stokes her fear of life by collecting scrapbooks of grisly crimes. This latest accident, however, becomes the impetus for them to face their fears and finally conquer them. West's brash, funny novel is immensely appealing, and it is both a paen to and a send-up of family bonds. Joanne Wilkinson


From Kirkus Reviews
Southern gothic and soap-opera hype collide exuberantly in West's vivid if hokey third novel (She Flew the Coop, 1994, etc.): a tale of three sisters and their plucky Grandma fighting to dispel a family curse in a small Tennessee town. When Jo-Nell, the youngest of the three McBroom sisters, is near death as the result of a train accident, the family thinks it's just another manifestation of the curse that has dogged them for three generations. Originally from Texas, most of the McBrooms now live in Tallulah, Tennessee, where everybody knows everybody else's business. Freddie, the middle sister, left Tallulah and headed for California after being expelled from medical school; now, she interrupts a whale-watching visit to Baja, Mexico, with fellow scientist-husband Sam to fly to Jo-Nell's bedside. Grandma Minerva, meanwhile, fears that the old family curse has been revived. Eleanor, the eldest, is so obsessed with crime that she cannot go out alone, and picks up widows from the Senior Citizen Center before she drives to the store. As the four women alternate recollections of the past with accounts of what happens when they're all together again, the plot moves at a hyperventilating pace. Minerva recalls her Texas childhood, her marriage, the tragic deaths of two of her children, the move to Tallulah, where--such is the power of the curse--husband Amos dies and daughter Ruth marries Freddie McBroom, is widowed, marries again only to be abandoned, then commits suicide. Jo-Nell, regarded locally as a slut, has also been unlucky in love; and Freddie finds herself still attracted to her own first love, Jackson, a pediatrician with a similarly checkered family history. When Minerva dies, the sisters, having finally faced the past, are ready to move on. Colorful, larger-than-life characters strut and stew with zest across an equally colorful terrain--in a tale that grips in spite of itself. ($35,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Acclaim for Michael Lee West American Pie "Colorful, larger-than-life characters strut and stew with zest across an equally colorful terrain..." --Kirkus Review "American Pie is delicious, literary treat...Well worth reading for both the humor and poignancy it portrays." --The Nashville Tennessean "West is a major talent, and American Pie serves as proof...West's writing is a 'Discovery Channel' for and about people." --Nashville Life She Flew The Coop "The author of the acclaimed Crazy Ladies has captured the color, eccentricities and tragicomedy that the best Southern writers do so well." --Publishers Weekly, starred review "Funny, irreverent." --New York Times Book Review "West has created characters who are so teeming with life you would have to stand back to create some breathing room if you met them." --Washington Post Book World Crazy Ladies "Not since Flannery O'Connor's first book has a debt by a young Southerner been so filled with wry humor and humanity, so precisely right in its idioms, and so distinctive in its voices." --St. Petersburg Times


About the Author
Michael Lee West is the author of She Flew the Coop, American Pie, Crazy Ladies, and Consuming Passions. Her fiction has also appeared in First for Women, Wind, Southern, and other magazines. Her forthcoming books include Mad Girls in Love and Mermaids in the Basement, sequels to Crazy Ladies. A registered nurse, West lives with her husband, two sons, a Scottish terrier, and five alleycats in a renovated funeral home outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the waters off the Baja coast, far from her childhood home of Tallulah, Tennessee, marine biologist Freddie McBroom studies the life habits of grey whales with her scientist husband, Sam. An ex-medical student expelled for stealing cadaver parts, Freddie has left the South and her past behind, never once looking back; practical and serious, she is the antithesis of her eccentric sisters, Eleanor and Jo-Nell, who have remained in their hometown to carve out very different lives for themselves amid the small-town day-to-day of Tallulah. Eleanor, an older-than-her-years agoraphobic doughnut baker who talks herself through traumatic trips to the local Winn-Dixie, shares her home with free-spirited, sharp-tongued Jo-Nell, whose penchant for cowboys and large amounts of tequila has propelled her headlong through life. Looking out for all of them is their grandmother, Minerva Pray - vice president of the Tallulah Widows' Club - a woman whose faith has run dry but for the divine inspiration she finds in providing gargantuan quantities of homemade pound cake to a community that always seems to be burying someone. As Jo-Nell lies in a hospital bed after her Volkswagen is rammed by the midnight train, McBrooms past and present swirl around her in a haze of painkillers; she becomes the unlikely magnet pulling the sisters together, forcing them to confront their histories, futures, and one another, ultimately proving, as Freddie points out, that "the pull of family is stronger than gravity."

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Southern gothic and soap-opera hype collide exuberantly in West's vivid if hokey third novel (She Flew the Coop, 1994, etc.): a tale of three sisters and their plucky Grandma fighting to dispel a family curse in a small Tennessee town.

When Jo-Nell, the youngest of the three McBroom sisters, is near death as the result of a train accident, the family thinks it's just another manifestation of the curse that has dogged them for three generations. Originally from Texas, most of the McBrooms now live in Tallulah, Tennessee, where everybody knows everybody else's business. Freddie, the middle sister, left Tallulah and headed for California after being expelled from medical school; now, she interrupts a whale-watching visit to Baja, Mexico, with fellow scientist-husband Sam to fly to Jo-Nell's bedside. Grandma Minerva, meanwhile, fears that the old family curse has been revived. Eleanor, the eldest, is so obsessed with crime that she cannot go out alone, and picks up widows from the Senior Citizen Center before she drives to the store. As the four women alternate recollections of the past with accounts of what happens when they're all together again, the plot moves at a hyperventilating pace. Minerva recalls her Texas childhood, her marriage, the tragic deaths of two of her children, the move to Tallulah, where—such is the power of the curse—husband Amos dies and daughter Ruth marries Freddie McBroom, is widowed, marries again only to be abandoned, then commits suicide. Jo-Nell, regarded locally as a slut, has also been unlucky in love; and Freddie finds herself still attracted to her own first love, Jackson, a pediatrician with a similarly checkered family history. When Minerva dies, the sisters, having finally faced the past, are ready to move on.

Colorful, larger-than-life characters strut and stew with zest across an equally colorful terrain—in a tale that grips in spite of itself.