I keep thinking about how this unique, lovely story brings the reader a triple bonus — the sense of home, of history and of compassion. Fullerton delivers all three in abundance. One can know the place as well as the people. The characters sizzle with personality. The narrator’s sense of self makes me envious, because I know it’s possible to be so true to one’s self — would that we all could be so knowledgable.
This is the Old South butting heads with Today. Old attitudes exist but, hopefully, we are all learning and becoming so much more than we have been in the past. This wonderful novel shows there is hope for the future.
It’s a timely read. The Mule recommends Little Tea. (<–Amazon link) Available now. Listed in the summer reading list of Deep South Magazine.
–Valerie MacEwan
Amazon:
One phone call from Renny to come home and “see about” the capricious Ava and Celia Wakefield decides to overlook her distressful past in the name of friendship.
For three reflective days at Renny’s lake house in Heber Springs, Arkansas, the three childhood friends reunite and examine life, love, marriage, and the ties that bind, even though Celia’s personal story has yet to be healed. When the past arrives at the lake house door in the form of her old boyfriend, Celia must revisit the life she’d tried to outrun.
As her idyllic coming of age alongside her best friend, Little Tea, on her family’s ancestral grounds in bucolic Como, Mississippi unfolds, Celia realizes there is no better place to accept her own story than in this circle of friends who have remained beside her throughout the years. Theirs is a friendship that can talk any life sorrow into a comic tragedy, and now that the racial divide in the Deep South has evolved, Celia wonders if friendship can triumph over history.
From the Back Cover
On the surface, Little Tea is about three forever friends, Celia, Ava, and Renny, who come together to do what they’ve always done best: love and support each other through the uncertainties and difficulties life brings to each of us. But in this compelling story, much more lies beneath the surface. Clare Fullerton skillfully draws us into a lost world of Southern traditions and norms where past tragedies cast long, dark shadows on present-day lives, and no one ever truly escapes.
