J. Belinda Yandell

Something Blue J. Belinda Yandell

"Something Blue" chronicles one week in the lives of three generations of southern women trying to survive the most stressful tradition in the history of mankind: a wedding. Ellen, the bride, is frantic enough with thirty-six Yankees of her fiancee's family flying in to her sleepy Georgia hometown, but she has her own ghosts -- and her own family -- to contend with. Her strong-willed mother is being sued in the latest skirmish with the town's only other hairdresser. Her grandmother -- who still sleeps with a gun under her pillow -- is having a secret affair with the widower next door. Scarlet, her oldest sister, is the Bridesmaid form hell who runs the wedding as if she is planning D-Day, and Kate, the other sister, is reeling from a boyfriend who dumped her with only a note left on the refrigerator. Through trips to the local alligator farm, illicit fumblings in the church's baptismal, gunfire, allergy attacks, embarrassing tattoos, a lascivious father of the groom, the lesbian life-partner of the groom's grandmother, a dozen calls to the psychiatrist, and an accidental overdose of Valium, everyone survives to learn that love is all you need. This is Southern-fried chick-lit with warmth and humor; imagine "Steel Magnolias" meets "Bridget Jones."