What is Laura Lane McNeal reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Laura Lane McNeal, author of Dollbaby.

Her entry begins:

I don’t know about you, but I have several dozen books stacked in neat piles on the floor next to my bed, waiting for me to finish the other dozen that have actually made it onto the top of my bedside table. Yet none of these are what I picked up to read next. As with everything else in my life, I’m kind of a spur of the moment person – if I walk out of the door and see weeds in the garden, I start weeding. So one fine day a few weeks ago, I stopped by my mother’s house to drop a book off for her, and out of the corner of my eye, spotted a copy of Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup among the books in her bookshelf. All the hype about the movie made me recognize the title. That was your grandmother’s, my mother offered as she watched me flipping through the yellowed pages. Intrigued as to why my parents kept it after my grandmother died some twenty-five years ago, I borrowed it. It never...[read on]

About Dollbaby, from the publisher:

A big-hearted coming-of-age debut set in civil rights-era New Orleans—a novel of Southern eccentricity and secrets

When Ibby Bell’s father dies unexpectedly in the summer of 1964, her mother unceremoniously deposits Ibby with her eccentric grandmother Fannie and throws in her father’s urn for good measure. Fannie’s New Orleans house is like no place Ibby has ever been—and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum—is like no one she has ever met. Fortunately, Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her smart-mouthed daughter, Dollbaby, take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets.

For Fannie’s own family history is fraught with tragedy, hidden behind the closed rooms in her ornate Uptown mansion. It will take Ibby’s arrival to begin to unlock the mysteries there. And it will take Queenie and Dollbaby’s hard-won wisdom to show Ibby that family can sometimes be found in the least expected places.

For fans of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and The Help, Dollbaby brings to life the charm and unrest of 1960s New Orleans through the eyes of a young girl learning to understand race for the first time.

By turns uplifting and funny, poignant and full of verve, Dollbaby is a novel readers will take to their hearts.

Visit Laura Lane McNeal's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dollbaby.

Writers Read: Laura Lane McNeal.

--Marshal Zeringue