Sweet Tea and Sympathy (Southern Eclectic, #1)

by Molly Harper

[MurderByDeath]

Molly Harper's writing makes me laugh, but I remember when I read her first Half-Moon Hollow book Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs, it took me a good part of the book to care about the MC, Jane; the book just started off slow and bumpy for me.   Sweet Tea and Sympathy was the same; I just wasn't feeling it for the first half of the book and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to care about Margot or her very odd dynamic with Kyle.  But things started to click about halfway through.  The snappy dialog that Harper is so good at kicked in, especially when Margot was with her cousins, and her interaction with the book's 'villain', Sarah Lee, was satisfyingly catty without being too catty.  After that midway point all the disparate pieces of the story started to come together, and more importantly, Margot became a sympathetic protagonist.  I started to care about what happened to her and even though I really struggled to figure out the clunky progression of her romance with Kyle, I found myself sold on them by the end.   This is the first in a new series and, frankly, not Molly Harper at her finest, but it was a light, enjoyable read.  I have every reason to believe future books will only get better as Harper finds her groove in this tiny eclectic Southern town.   This book could work for either   Pancha Ganapati: Read anything involving a need for forgiveness in the story line; a story about redemption  (Margot's reunion with her estranged father, a recovering alcoholic whom she's never met, is a big part of the story), or  Thanksgiving Day: Books with a theme of coming together to help a community or family in need.  The town of Lake Sackett is dying after an accident at the dam creating the lake emptied out a significant amount of the lake's water, making the effects of an ongoing drought more devastating to the tourist trade that keeps most of the town afloat (pun intended).  Their last hope is a week long founder's day celebration that's headed for disaster until Margot steps in to help.