Melissa DeCarlo

Mattie is not a good person. She would be the first to say so. Still her step-father loves her and it is to him, always, that she runs when she is in over her head. When she finds out her grandmother, a woman she has never met and whom her mother has told her nothing about, dies and leaves her a house, it could not come at a better time. Broke, pregnant and unable/unwilling to take advantage of her sick step-father, Mattie heads out to claim her inheritance. She doesn't expect to learn the mother she knew was not the girl everyone else knew and she becomes almost obsessed with finding out how the girl this town knew became the less-than-stellar mother she grew up knowing. Along the way she finds herself.… (meer)

This book was written by a woman who lives here in Tyler, TX about 5 years ago. For some reason, I never read it when it first came out, so I grabbed the audiobook when it was offered on Chirp a couple of weeks ago. Although this story has been told many times before - a young woman with a messed-up life travels to get the inheritance she has been left by the grandmother she has never seen, and once there learns much about herself and where she is from - this is not a bad first novel. It's full of interesting characters and plenty of plot twists, and, of course, a heart-warming ending. An excellent beach read, or for a rainy weekend.… (meer)