Gr. 3-5
New to Wakeview, South Carolina, in the late 1970s, Sylvia, 11, is sad when Momma (really her aunt) leaves for a while to find her family roots. Sylvia stays with her great-grandma Miz Lula Maye, 100 years old, who helps Sylvia with the stress of starting at a new school. When kids tease Sylvia about her friendship with the "old witch," Sylvia is ashamed (and angry at herself for being ashamed), but Miz Lula laughs at the kids and lets Sylvia know that she is always safe and loved at home.

Joyce sees and knows things she should not know. And it all started after her accident. Wanting to get to the bottom of things, to discover the reason for her newfound knowledge, Joyce tracks down her blood donor…

This is a heartwarming, laugh out loud romantic comedy that has everything you could want: laughs, strong characters, excellent writing, wonderful plot twists and a happy ending.

Humorist Barry demonstrates once again that he has reached that plateau of success where he can do no wrong-almost. This second novel represents something of a decline from Big Trouble, his first venture into fiction, which emerged as an incident-crowded mystery topped off with rapid-fire laughs and a dash of satire. This time, the laughs are not much more than titters, and the incidents are only intermittently compelling. In brief, the story is built around events on one of the floating casinos that takes paying customers three miles off the Florida coast each night to gamble. It leads readers into a crazy complexity of money laundering, drug dealing, murder, sex, violence, hijacking, and undercover work. As it is written by Barry, the book probably will meet with a certain amount of popular favor, but a caveat is in order: This is not the Barry of his syndicated columns or his nonfiction books. As he himself puts it, "This book contains some bad words," which he justifies by saying that his "unsavory characters" talk that way. A likely story.