num_pages: 252
description: It was the summer of 1956, a summer of drive-ins, gin, fraternity parties, necking in parked cars while Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" played endlessly on radios, running like a leitmotif through the summer. A summer of small tragedies, large banalities, and endless, shrouding heat. And reigning over it all was Maggie Deloach, of Lytton, Georgia—a modern-day Scarlett O'Hara…young, lovely, popular, a Kappa, pinned to Boots Claiborne, an aristocratic Kappa Alpha.   Maggie had been carefully brought up to follow the Rules—rules that guaranteed she would live happily ever after, rules she never questioned. She would graduate from Randolph University in a year, and after that she would marry Boots and live on his parents' cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Maggie's rules served her well.   But in the summer of 1956 she met two men who set her world afire: Hoyt Cunningham, a young AP reporter covering the birth of the infant civil rights movement in Alabama; and a black man whose name she never knew, a prisoner on a Mississippi street. Maggie's crystal, perfect world began to crack…and at the end of that long, hot summer, she found herself alone in a new world, whose only rules were the ones she must make herself.  This first novel does for the fifties what Mary McCarthy's The Group did for the forties—it captures the essence of that strange, smug, muffled, portentous decade accurately and movingly, and renders it timeless. Anne Siddons' writing is powerful, funny, evocative, superb, and her characters will be greeted with a shock of real and poignant recognition.
language: English
title: Heartbreak Hotel
titlecomplete: Heartbreak Hotel
genres: Fiction, American, Coming Of Age, Womens, Romance, Chick Lit, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Southern
ratings_count: 1600
publisher: Simon & Schuster