"Contemporary tearjerker"

Fifteen years ago, Cassie Madison was engaged to Joe Warner, but he eloped with her sister Harriet. Cassie fled the red clay of Georgia for the cement of Manhattan, vowing to never return. Over the years, Joe and Harriet have had five children with each new birth ripping into Cassie's guts.

Harriet calls Cassie to tell her that their father is dying and wants to see her. Only for daddy would Cassie comes home. She leaves her fiancé, who insists he must take care of their business, and drives to Walton. She arrives in time to say her good-byes to her beloved daddy.

Wanting his daughter to live in Georgia, her father leaves the family home to Cassie. Locally Dr. Sam Parker wants Cassie to stay, as he has loved her for a long time. However, she engaged back in New York and Sam knows he can never have her as long as she refuses to let go of the past and accept that Joe and Harriet belonged together just like he and Cassie do.

Fans of southern relationship dramas will relish FALLING HOME. The story line is at its best when Cassie still reeling from betrayal falls in love with good neighbor Sam and her nieces and nephews. The tale goes into hyper soap opera land with a subplot involving Harriet's health. Readers who enjoy a novel that invokes a Chatahoochie River worth of tears (not at drought level) will want to read Karen White's contemporary tearjerker.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted May 18, 2002

Summary

FALLING HOME is a coming home story about forgiveness and acceptance, and of finding love in the most unexpected of places.

Home is where the heart is, but Cassie Madison prefers to think of it as a place where one if born, then outgrows, along with skinned knees and childhood dreams. A humiliated Cassie left Walton, Georgia for Manhattan fifteen years before, vowing never to return. And then her sister calls. Their father is dying and wants Cassie to come back home. When Cassie's father dies, saddling her with the family's antebellum home and letters hinting of an unknown sibling, Cassie finds herself sinking into the red Georgia clay like quicksand. Reluctantly, Cassie is pulled into the lives of her sister and family, and that of Sam Parker, the town doctor. When tragedy strikes, Cassie is led to discover that home is a place that lives in one's heart, waiting with open arms to be rediscovered.