Mountain Brook series by Katherine Clark (#1-#3)
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Overview: KATHERINE CLARK holds an A.B. degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from Emory. She is the coauthor of the oral biographies Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story with Onnie Lee Logan and Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet with Eugene Walter (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). A former student of Martin Hames, the inspiration for the character of Norman Laney, Clark has written three additional Mountain Brook novels featuring Laney and his students—All the Governor’s Men, The Harvard Bride, and The Ex-suicide—all forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press imprint Story River Books. Clark is currently collaborating with Pat Conroy on his oral biography, also forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press. She lives on the Gulf Coast.
Genre: General Fiction, Literature
1. The Headmaster’s Darlings
The Headmaster’s Darlings is a satirical comedy of manners featuring the morbidly obese Norman Laney, an unorthodox, inspirational English teacher and college counselor for an elite private school in Mountain Brook, a privileged community outside of Birmingham. A natural wonder from blue-collar Alabama, Laney has barged into the exclusive world of Mountain Brook on the strength of his sensational figure and its several-hundred-pound commitment to art and culture. His mission is to defeat "the barbarians," introduce true civilization in place of its thin veneer, and change his Southern world for the better. Although Laney is adored by his students (his "darlings") and by the society ladies (also his "darlings") who rely on him to be the life of their parties and the leader of their book clubs, there are others who think he is a larger-than-life menace to the comfortable status quo of Mountain Brook society and must be banished.
When Laney is summoned to the principal’s office one day in November 1984, he expects to be congratulated for a recent public-relations triumph he engineered on behalf of the school. Instead his letter of resignation is demanded with no explanation given. Faced with an ultimatum and his imminent dismissal, Laney must outflank the principal at his own underhanded game, find out who said what about him and why, and launch his current crop of Alabama students into the wider world—or at least into Ivy League colleges.
2. All the Governor’s Men
It s the summer of George Wallace s last run for governor of Alabama in 1982, and the state is at a crossroads. In Katherine Clark s All the Governor s Men, a political comedy of manners that reimagines Wallace s last campaign, voters face a clear choice between the infamous segregationist, now a crippled old man in a wheelchair, and his primary opponent, Aaron Osgood, a progressive young candidate poised to liberate the state from its George Wallace poisoned past.
Daniel Dobbs, a twenty one-year-old Harvard graduate and South Alabama native, is one of many young people who have joined the campaign representing hope and change for a downtrodden Alabama. A political animal himself, Daniel possesses so much charm and charisma that he was nicknamed the Governor in college. Nowhe is engaged in the struggle to conquer once and for all the malignant man Alabamians have traditionally called the Governor.
This historic election isn t the only thing Daniel wants to win. During his senior year, he fell in love with a freshman girl from Mountain Brook, the Tiny Kingdom of wealth and privilege, a world apart from his own Alabama origins. A small-town country boy, Daniel desperately wants to gain the favor of his girlfriend s family along with her mentor, the larger-than-life English teacher Norman Laney. Daniel also wants to keep one or two ex-girlfriends firmly out of the picture. In the course of his summer, he must untangle his complicated personal life, satisfy the middle-class dreams of his parents for their Harvard-educated son, decide whether to enter law school or launch his own political career, and, incidentally, help his candidate defeat George Wallace, in a close and increasingly dirty race.
3. The Harvard Bride
Katherine Clark s The Harvard Bride begins with the lavish Mountain Brook wedding of Daniel Dobbs and Caroline Elmore, college sweethearts introduced in Clark s second novel, All the Governor s Men. Picking up where the previous novel ended, The Harvard Bride is a wry comedy of manners and portrait of a marriage unfolding against the backdrop of the return of native southerners, with their newly completed Ivy League educations, to the self-contained world of Mountain Brook s Tiny Kingdom.
As a newlywed Caroline struggles to find her bearings unwilling to join the Junior League, look for a first house, contemplate motherhood, or even finish her thank-you notes. Even worse, she can t manage to fulfill her calling as a writer or accomplish anything else worthy of her Harvard degree. Meanwhile, Daniel s career as a first-year associate at a powerful law firm is going so well she hardly sees him. The most exciting aspect of the new bride s life is her handsome next-door neighbor, a writer himself and seemingly a kindred spirit. The reappearance of an old school friend a southern belle bombshell in hot pursuit of all eligible bachelors and potential real estate clients only adds to Caroline s problems. In her desperation to forge an identity wholly her own, Caroline accepts an unexpected job offer from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, forty-five minutes away from home. But just when she thinks she has succeeded in putting her personal and professional life together, her fragile new existence falls inexplicably apart.
Also featuring the return of larger-than-life Brook-Haven headmaster Norman Laney, The Harvard Bride is at once a social satire and a richly nuanced love story. Caroline s journey of self-discovery takes readers from the jeweled heart of Mountain Brook and Bama s sorority row, into James Agee s Hale County from the inner sanctums of southern belles into the Deep South rural farmland, where slaves and sharecroppers once toiled. In the South the past often contains the keys to understanding the present and inspiring a better future. As Caroline travels into the heart of the Alabama darkness from which she came, she suddenly comes face to face with what she needs to build a life on her own terms in her native land, if she can summon the courage to make a difficult choice and take a huge risk.
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