*****New York Book Festival Finalist
*****Five Star Readers' FavoritePublishers Weekly - "Aunt Sookie & Me is a heady and hilarious mixture of hard-won wisdom and Southern saltiness.....the tale deals with some weighty issues including sexual identity and domestic violence, but Garvin's compassion and light touch make this a highly entertaining and enjoyable novel."
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Kirkus Reviews....Michael Scott Garvin tells the story of a 13-year-old orphan sent to live with her forthright great-aunt. When Poppy Wainwright's grandmother dies, she travels from her home in Arkansas to live with her grandmother's older sister, Sookie, in Savannah, Georgia. "Your Grandma Lainey was a self-righteous nit-wit," Sookie tells Poppy upon their first meeting, "and if I had the gumption, I'd drive myself up to Mountain Home and spit on her freshly dug grave."  Sookie is everything Poppy's grandmother was not: atheistic, slovenly, suspicious, prone to vendettas, and completely lacking any verbal filter. Yet there's much that this foulmouthed, long-lived woman has to teach young Poppy about the world and how to be a woman in it.Â
Aunt Sookie & Me is a fine submission in the long tradition of Southern bildungsromans. Garvin animates his characters with wonderfully vulgar dialogue...and he manages to tackle serious issues of sexuality and domestic violence while keeping the book lighthearted and highly readable...An often charming and funny coming-of-age tale...readers won't want Garvin's larger-than-life vision to end." - Kirkus Reviews 2017
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..."There is no surer way to feel blessed in this life than to delve into a story with complicated, flawed, flailing characters. Aunt Sookie & Me by Michael Scott Garvin is just such a tale...Drawn so well, the characters...did not evoke singular reactions from me. Rather each made me feel a complicated array of emotions...From time to time I pickup a work that keeps me turning pages...This is such a great read!" - 5 Star! - Patricia Reding -Readers' FavoriteÂ
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Young Poppy Wainwright feels much like a deck of cards, shuffled around from a boozing mother to a beloved grandmother. Finally bused to Savannah, Georgia, to live with her grandmother's cantankerous sister, Sookie. Through the enlightened eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl, the hilarity and insanity ensues.
From the best-selling author of A Faithful Son, this rollicking romp of a ride does not disappoint.
Aunt Sookie & Me: The Sordid Tale of a Scandalous Southern Belle is irreverent, hilarious, and heartbreaking. All political correctness is buried alongside the dead corpse in the family vegetable garden in this riotous book.  But don't let the folksy and fresh recipe fool you, Garvin serves up a big helping of reality, cutting through small-town bigotry and bias.
