Hosted by The Book Wheel, this month-long event takes place during September and features 30 authors discussing their favorite recent reads on 30 different blogs.

Patti Callahan Henry writes on a favorite summer read I’m dying to get my hands on: Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Their recommendations for what to see and where to go are personal and well informed, if a little boosterish, with a proud emphasis on “the luxurious, the classy, or at least the truly unique.Today I’m pleased to host the second stop of 30 Authors in 30 Days, a first of its kind event aimed at connecting readers, bloggers and authors. Native Georgians Jordan McAuley and Matt Burkhalter appeal to a more specific audience in this pint-size celebration of Atlanta’s bustling gay community. “I’ll try to give you all the information you need to become a Georgian,” he writes, “or at least to act enough like one to fool the natives.” Longtime newspaperman Don O’Briant stuffs an awful lot into this slim volume. Page’s brilliantly executed pocket guide: “What you will discover when you walk these roads of history is that the actions of everyday citizens-people just like you and me-transformed these plain, ordinary buildings into monuments of democracy.”

John Lewis provides the foreword for Harry G. Sacred Places: A Guide to the Civil Rights Sites in Atlanta, Georgia Beyond the sibling melodrama, Driftwood Summer is a loving tribute to the role a good bookstore can play in a community. Estranged sisters Riley, Maisy, and Adalee reunite in coastal Georgia to celebrate their mother’s seventieth birthday and to try to save the family’s bookstore. Driftwood SummerĪtlanta author Patti Callahan Henry’s Driftwood Summer also features three women, plus a 100-year-old house.

In this novel by Georgia’s Donna Ball, three women of a certain age leave the comforts of suburbia and sink every cent they have into a century-old money pit-a rambling house on sixteen acres in the bucolic Shenandoah Valley: “The quietness was so intense, it was almost a texture-as light as silk, as soft as velvet.” Through a renovation that may never end, Cici, Lindsay, and Bridget discover the charms of small-town life and the art of aging gracefully. The author, a former Atlantan who now lives in Colorado, is especially adept at conveying the incomparable, sometimes mystifying love-hate relationship possible between sisters.

Ultimately, the ending is a little too tidy, but the characters-whether alive or dead-are compelling and believable. Mae has relocated to be closer to her younger sister, March, who is rehabilitating after a devastating fall from a horse. As the novel begins, young do-gooder Mae Wallace has left her job in Atlanta at World Matters, a nonprofit agency loosely modeled after CARE (where the author was a consultant for four years), and moved to an island off the South Carolina coast, right next door to grieving widower Hale Brock.

Driftwood summer patti callahan henry