Sweet Jiminy by Kristin Gore

". . . buried secrets and prejudice . . .

Builds with a slow Southern drawl into an emotional barn burner.

Jiminy Davis stops in the middle of a very successful and stressful life to wonder what she’s doing. She leaves Chicago and her plans for being a lawyer to bury herself in Mississippi in the little town where she visited her grandparents. Jiminy needs to find herself and her purpose. What she finds are buried secrets and prejudice that she is determined to uncover.

Slow moving stories that seem unfocused seldom excite me, but I keep reading just in case something wonderful happens. Kristin Gore meanders a bit through the first part of Sweet Jiminy, taking a slow and circuitous route that mirrors Jiminy Davis’s confusion. When Jiminy finds something worth fighting for, the story takes off nose to the ground like an old hunting dog.

The pace in Sweet Jiminy is seductive and Gore sucked me into the life and times of Mississippi life with the detailed background and the delicate way in which she deals with the budding romance between Jiminy and Bo, always hinting there was some dark secret that would change their lives. Gore delivered on that half promise and ended on what seems at first glance to be a sad note when it is in effect peacefully hopeful.

The characters in Sweet Jiminy are deceptively simple but memorable. Kristin Gore carefully crafts a corner of the South that is fragrant as a magnolia blossom and just as beautiful where worms and rot have taken root, and then she plucks out the worms and prunes the tree with all the skill of a master tree surgeon.

Reviewer: J. M. Cornwell