From School Library Journal
YA?Innocent compassion links 5-year-old Claire Maloney to Roan Sullivan, a motherless 10-year-old lad whose life with his drunken, despicable father is a nightmare. A bond develops between the two that neither time nor space can break. Claire's family traces its roots back several generations to Ireland, and with them the mystical beliefs that creep into its contemporary culture and customs. Both families have deep roots in Dunderry, Georgia, where long-standing relationships weave in and out of daily life and are often more biological than at first acknowledged. When Roan is forced out of Dunderry, at age 15, after he kills his father while defending Claire, she is unable to forget him. For the next 20 years, she searches for Roan. Unknown to her, however, he has kept watch over her until he can prove himself worthy of her. A tragic accident brings Claire back to her home to recuperate and eventually Roan back to her. This is a story for any romantic who wants a bit of mystery, a lot of suspense, a tale of two star-crossed lovers, and a satisfying ending to a fast-paced novel. YAs will readily identify with Claire and Roan as they struggle to become the adults they want to be; readers will cheer them on to their eventual success.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Red-haired, Irish, the only girl and youngest child in a family with three sons, Claire Maloney is feisty, unafraid, and burning to right the injustices of the world, starting with those in the small Georgia town dominated by her extended family. At the age of five, Claire stands up for drunken troublemaker Roanie Sullivan, the neglected son of Big Roan and a despised outsider. It takes two tragedies to make Claire realize that the most generous impulses can be as destructive as selfish ones and 20 years of stubborn independence and loneliness before Roanie and Claire can accept home and family along with the ambivalent feelings they inspire. This novel is a rich evocation of family and place that portrays all too painfully the hurt and comfort, the frustrations and rewards brought by heritage and family. Recommended.?Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Claire Maloney is the protagonist in this story of a well-to-do Georgia family that dates back to early Irish roots. Claire's childhood friend was Roan Sullivan, white trash from a poverty-stricken neighborhood. When Claire was 10 and Roan 15, the boy killed his father when the elder Sullivan attacked Claire. Roan is sent away; 20 years later, he comes back into her life. Smith, author of five other novels, is an exceptional storyteller. She begins this entertaining novel with, "It started the year I performed as a tap-dancing leprechaun at the St. Patrick's Day carnival and Roanie Sullivan threatened to cut my cousin Carlton's throat with a rusty pocket-knife." If ever a novelist hooked a reader with the opening sentence, this is it. Expect demand by patrons who relish popular fiction that is at once exciting and heartwarming. George Cohen


From Kirkus Reviews
A white-bread take on the stock elements of southern family saga--family secrets, eccentric relatives, the importance of place, and the girl who falls in love with a handsome boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Fourteen-year-old Roanie Sullivan, a motherless boy whose father, Big Roan, is a violent drunk, is an outcast in the small Georgia town of Dunderry. But nine-year-old Claire Maloney, the spoiled daughter of a large, prominent family, springs to his defense--offering him rides to school and helping to clear him when he's accused of stealing money. Despite his traumatic upbringing, Roanie is responsible and upright, and, after Claire's cousin Carlton knocks out some of his teeth in a fight, the Maloneys offer him a home. Roanie works hard around the Maloneys' farm and causes peace to break out between the family's warring matriarchs; meanwhile, he and Claire become best friends and swear a chaste love. Then Claire, seeking help after her Great-Gran has a car accident, stumbles into Big Roan's trailer; he hits her and threatens to rape her before Roanie shows up and shoots his father dead. Roanie is sent to a foster home, while Claire is left to brood about him. Shift then to 20 years later: Roan, who's nursed his passion for Claire but failed to get in touch, has become a millionaire real-estate speculator and adopted a son, Matthew, who, according to rumor, is the illegitimate child of Claire's uncle. When Roan learns that Claire, now a prizewinning reporter, has been badly injured while fleeing a wife-batterer who's angry about one of her stories, he seeks her out. The two fall effortlessly back in love, and the last hundred or so pages can only defer their happiness through red-herring complications. A cloyingly sweet love story whose willful heroine and grudge-bearing hero remain strangely unsympathetic. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Twenty years ago, Claire Maloney was the willful, pampered, tomboyish daughter of the town's most respected family, but that didn't stop her from befriending Roan Sullivan, a fierce, motherless boy who lived in a rusted-out trailer amid junked cars. No one in Dunderry, Georgia--least of all Claire's family--could understand the bond between these two mavericks. But Roan and Claire belonged together...until the dark afternoon when violence and terror overtook them, and Roan disappeared from Claire's life. Now, two decades later, Claire is adrift, and the Maloneys are still hoping the past can be buried under the rich Southern soil. But Roan Sullivan is about to walk back into their lives....By turns tender and sexy and heartbreaking and exuberant, A Place to Call Home is an enthralling journey between two hearts--and a deliciously original novel from one of the most imaginative and appealing new voices in Southern fiction.


From the Publisher
"Rarely will a book touch your heart like A Place to Call Home. So sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy."
"A beautiful, believable love story."
"Stylishly written, filled with Southern ease and humor."


From the Inside Flap
Twenty years ago, Claire Maloney was the willful, pampered, tomboyish daughter of the town's most respected family, but that didn't stop her from befriending Roan Sullivan, a fierce, motherless boy who lived in a rusted-out trailer amid junked cars. No one in Dunderry, Georgia--least of all Claire's family--could understand the bond between these two mavericks. But Roan and Claire belonged together...until the dark afternoon when violence and terror overtook them, and Roan disappeared from Claire's life. Now, two decades later, Claire is adrift, and the Maloneys are still hoping the past can be buried under the rich Southern soil. But Roan Sullivan is about to walk back into their lives....By turns tender and sexy and heartbreaking and exuberant, A Place to Call Home is an enthralling journey between two hearts--and a deliciously original novel from one of the most imaginative and appealing new voices in Southern fiction.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I planned to be the kind of old Southern lady who talks to her tomato plants and buys sweaters for her cats.  I'd just turned thirty, but I was already sizing up where I'd been and where I was headed.  So I knew that when I was old I'd be deliberately peculiar. I'd wear bright red lipstick and tell embarrassing true stories about my family, and people would say, "I heard she was always a little funny, if you know what I mean."

They wouldn't understand why, and I didn't intend to tell them.  I thought I'd sit in a rocking chair on the porch of some fake-antebellum nursing home for decrepit journalists, get drunk on bourbon and Coca-Cola, and cry over Roan Sullivan.  I was only ten the last time I saw him, and he was fifteen, and twenty years had passed since then, but I'd never forgotten him and knew I never would.

"I'd like to believe life turned out well for Roanie," Mama said periodically, and Daddy nodded without meeting her eyes, and they dropped the subject.  They felt guilty about the part they'd played in driving Roan away, and they knew I couldn't forgive them for it.  He was one of the disappointments between them and me, which was saying a lot, since I'd felt like such a helpless failure when they brought me home from the hospital last spring.

My two oldest brothers, Josh and Brady, didn't speak about Roan at all.  They were away at college during most of the Roan Sullivan era in our family.  But my two other brothers remembered him each time they came back from a hunting trip with a prize buck.  "It can't hold a candle to the one Roan Sullivan shot when we were kids," Evan always said to Hop.  "Nope," Hop agreed with a mournful sigh.  "That buck was a king." Evan and Hop measured regret in terms of antlers.

As for the rest of the family--Daddy's side, Mama's side, merged halves of a family tree so large and complex and deeply rooted it looked like an overgrown oak to strangers--Roan Sullivan was only a fading reflection in the mirror of their biases and regrets and sympathies.  How they remembered him depended on how they saw themselves and our world back then, and most of them had turned the painful memory to the wall.

But he and I were a permanent fixture in local history, as vivid and tragic as anything could be in a small Georgia community isolated in the lap of the mountains, where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmothers' china.  My great-grandmother's glassware and china service, by the way, were packed in a crate in Mama and Daddy's attic.  Mama had this wistful little hope that I'd use it someday, that her only girl among five children would magically and belatedly blossom into the kind of woman who set a table with china instead of plastic.

There was hope for that.  But what happened to Roan Sullivan and me changed my life and changed my family.  Because of him we saw ourselves as we were, made of the kindness and cruelty that bond people together by blood, marriage, and time.  I tried to save him and he ended up saving me.  He might have been dead for twenty years--I didn't know then--but I knew I'd come full circle because of him: I would always wait for him to come back, too.

The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At thirty, Claire Maloney knows her life has become a major-league wreck. And she knows why it all started falling apart, too. Because Roan Sullivan was banished from Dunderry, Georgia, twenty years ago, and Claire hasn't heard from him since. She was only ten then, and Roan fifteen, but what happened to the two of them is the stuff of local legend, as vivid and dramatic as anything can be in a small town where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmother's china. Back then, Roan Sullivan lived in a trailer amid junked cars and rusted tin cans, while Claire was the willful, pampered young daughter of the town's most respected family. So no oneleast of all her parents - understood the bond that tied her to the fierce, motherless boy who had to fight every day for his place in the world. But Roan and Claire didn't choose one another; they belonged together, as involuntarily and permanently as the soil and the seed from which the foxgloves grew on the side of Dunshinnog Mountain. They were simply a part of the place, and a part of each other. Until the dark afternoon when violence and terror overtook them, and Roan disappeared from Claire's life. Now, twenty years later, Claire is adrift, and the Maloneys are still hoping the past can be buried forever under the rich Southern earth. But Roan Sullivan is about to walk back into their lives....

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A gracefully written and absorbing tale of a stubborn young woman's maturation amid a self-involved Southern clan, Smith's (Silk and Stone) sixth novel is a page-turner. Claire Mahoney is the fiercely independent daughter of the most prominent family in the insular small town of Dunderry, Ga., where class and race distinctions are fiercely observed. At the bottom of the tier is "white trash" widower Roan Sullivan, a disabled, alcoholic veteran and his son, Roanie. Claire sees the special qualities in this suspicious and distrustful boy and eventually wins Roanie's friendship. After his father is jailed, Roanie lives with the Maloneys, and becomes Claire's unequivocal protectoreven killing his own father when he assaults Claire. The frightened Maloneys send Roanie to a boys' home, from which he disappears. During the ensuing 20 years, Claire establishes herself as a crusading journalist. When she is injured in a murderous attack on the subject of her award-winning series on domestic violence, Claire comes home to Dunderry. She is listless and depressed until an unexpected reunion with a now worldly and wealthy Roanie reveals a shocking secret: during his fugitive years, Roanie raised the illegitimate son of a disreputable local woman and, allegedly, Claire's uncle. Soon, other dark secrets are revealed. Claire's elegiac voice, and the dark burden of guilt that haunts the narrative, prove seductive. Smith avoids melodrama as Claire, Roanie and others prove that with pure hearts people can transcend a troubled past. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Red-haired, Irish, the only girl and youngest child in a family with three sons, Claire Maloney is feisty, unafraid, and burning to right the injustices of the world, starting with those in the small Georgia town dominated by her extended family. At the age of five, Claire stands up for drunken troublemaker Roanie Sullivan, the neglected son of Big Roan and a despised outsider. It takes two tragedies to make Claire realize that the most generous impulses can be as destructive as selfish ones and 20 years of stubborn independence and loneliness before Roanie and Claire can accept home and family along with the ambivalent feelings they inspire. This novel is a rich evocation of family and place that portrays all too painfully the hurt and comfort, the frustrations and rewards brought by heritage and family. Recommended.Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass.

School Library Journal

YAInnocent compassion links 5-year-old Claire Maloney to Roan Sullivan, a motherless 10-year-old lad whose life with his drunken, despicable father is a nightmare. A bond develops between the two that neither time nor space can break. Claire's family traces its roots back several generations to Ireland, and with them the mystical beliefs that creep into its contemporary culture and customs. Both families have deep roots in Dunderry, Georgia, where long-standing relationships weave in and out of daily life and are often more biological than at first acknowledged. When Roan is forced out of Dunderry, at age 15, after he kills his father while defending Claire, she is unable to forget him. For the next 20 years, she searches for Roan. Unknown to her, however, he has kept watch over her until he can prove himself worthy of her. A tragic accident brings Claire back to her home to recuperate and eventually Roan back to her. This is a story for any romantic who wants a bit of mystery, a lot of suspense, a tale of two star-crossed lovers, and a satisfying ending to a fast-paced novel. YAs will readily identify with Claire and Roan as they struggle to become the adults they want to be; readers will cheer them on to their eventual success.Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

Kirkus Reviews

A white-bread take on the stock elements of southern family saga—family secrets, eccentric relatives, the importance of place, and the girl who falls in love with a handsome boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

Fourteen-year-old Roanie Sullivan, a motherless boy whose father, Big Roan, is a violent drunk, is an outcast in the small Georgia town of Dunderry. But nine-year-old Claire Maloney, the spoiled daughter of a large, prominent family, springs to his defense—offering him rides to school and helping to clear him when he's accused of stealing money. Despite his traumatic upbringing, Roanie is responsible and upright, and, after Claire's cousin Carlton knocks out some of his teeth in a fight, the Maloneys offer him a home. Roanie works hard around the Maloneys' farm and causes peace to break out between the family's warring matriarchs; meanwhile, he and Claire become best friends and swear a chaste love. Then Claire, seeking help after her Great-Gran has a car accident, stumbles into Big Roan's trailer; he hits her and threatens to rape her before Roanie shows up and shoots his father dead. Roanie is sent to a foster home, while Claire is left to brood about him. Shift then to 20 years later: Roan, who's nursed his passion for Claire but failed to get in touch, has become a millionaire real-estate speculator and adopted a son, Matthew, who, according to rumor, is the illegitimate child of Claire's uncle. When Roan learns that Claire, now a prizewinning reporter, has been badly injured while fleeing a wife-batterer who's angry about one of her stories, he seeks her out. The two fall effortlessly back in love, and the last hundred or so pages can only defer their happiness through red-herring complications.

A cloyingly sweet love story whose willful heroine and grudge-bearing hero remain strangely unsympathetic.