{ "item_title" : "Moon Over Edisto", "item_author" : [" Beth Webb Hart "], "item_description" : "The past has come knocking on Julia's door. Can she summon the courage to answer betrayal with love?Once, they were the happiest family under the sun, crabbing and fishing and painting on beautiful Edisto Island in South Carolina's lowcountry. Then everything went wrong, and twenty years later the Bennett family is still in pieces. Mary Ellen still struggles to understand why her picture-perfect marriage came apart. Daughter Meg keeps a death grip on her own family, controlling her relationships at a distance. And Julia thought she left it all behind.Julia's best friend, Marney, broke up her parents' marriage years ago. Now Marney shows up at her Manhattan apartment, asking the impossible--come home to Edisto Island to care for the half-sisters and half-brother she has never known. Marney, recently widowed, has lung cancer. There's no other family to care for the children while she's in the hospital following surgery.Julia loathes Marney. But if she doesn't step in, her own mother--who has never gotten over the divorce--will be called upon to take care of the children. So Julia heads to South Carolina to keep the peace.Julia grudgingly agrees to stay a week caring for her three young half-siblings. But there's something about Edisto that changes one, and she begins to reconnect with the place and the people that she's been running from her whole adult life.Can Julia and her fractured family somehow manage to come together again under that low-hanging Edisto moon?Contemporary Southern Christian fictionIncludes discussion questions for book clubsAlso by Beth Webb Hart: The Wedding Machine and Love, Charleston", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/59/554/202/1595542027_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "17.99", "online_price" : "17.99", "our_price" : "17.99", "club_price" : "17.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Healing hearts in South Carolina

The pace of Beth Webb Hart’s Moon Over Edisto builds slowly, meandering among her characters in a manner befitting the leisurely cadence of its coastal South Carolina setting. Artist and art professor Julia Bennett has been far removed from her Southern home for years, having retreated to New York almost 20 years ago, after her father left his wife and family for Julia’s college roommate and best friend, Marney. The wounds are still raw for the Bennett women, especially Julia. Panic attacks plague her from the story’s outset, a situation made worse by a surprise visit from Marney. Now widowed, Marney has lung cancer and needs an operation—and someone to look after her three children, Julia’s half siblings, after the surgery. Julia is the unlikely (and unwilling) choice, but her reluctant “yes” sends her on a painful and ultimately healing journey.

Back in South Carolina, Julia begins to deal with the past alongside the pull of the future she’s working so hard to build, even as her mother and sister face a similar battle. It comes as a surprise to them all when Julia begins to open her heart to her half siblings, particularly young Etta, who shares the same artistic skill as Julia and their father. Hart captures the voice of the winsome yet mysteriously silent Etta in occasional chapters told from her perspective.

Hart paints her characters vividly and excels in her minute detail of the Low Country, elevating the place to the status of a character through evocative descriptions that draw in her protagonist—and her readers as well.