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Henna's Small Town Immortalized in Ruby and the Stargazers

Fort Lauderdale, March 2005:  Fireside, Texas circa 1967 is the next small Southern town immortalized in literature in Marci Henna’s Ruby and the Stargazers.  In the tradition of Fannie Flagg’s Whistle Stop, Alabama, and Rebecca Wells’ Thornton City, Louisiana, Marci Henna’s Fireside, Texas is populated by quirky characters, hot gossip, Elvis, and cozy down-home Southern cooking. The local Fireside flavor combines with nostalgic details from those Flower Power years, as two sisters come of age with Ruby and Walt, grandparents who don’t act their age and whose love is legendary.

 Juliet Cranbourne remains in Fireside as a shopkeeper and editor of The Fireside Telegraph long after her grandparent’s deaths and her sister Evangeline’s moving on to big city life.  When Evangeline returns to help Juliet choose a headstone for Walt and Ruby’s graves, the rift between the sisters dissolves within their shared memories of growing up on the ranch with their doting grandparents, eccentric neighbors, farm animals, and each other during simpler times. 

 Fireside’s allure is in its simplicity as a backdrop to Southern cooking and superbly vivid characters.  In Fireside, people are loved because of their idiosyncrasies, not in spite of them.  Interwoven threads of the past surface in the tapestry of the present, as the sisters find that the legacy their grandparents left to them is one of love and acceptance, of the past, of the here-and-now, and of each other.  Ruby and the Stargazers will take its place alongside Fried Green Tomatoes and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Fireside and its inhabitants will live on in readers’ memories long after the last page is turned.

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