The bestselling author of Crazy Ladies returns with a funny and poignant tale that explores the complex bonds between a daughter and her father.

If I had not read the cover story in the National Enquirer, it's doubtful that I would have gone to Alabama and ruined my daddy's engagement party, much less sent the bride-to-be into a coma.” So begins this witty, heartfelt, and compulsively readable novel from Michael Lee West, a writer hailed as "wonderfully inventive" (San Francisco Chronicle), whose "accent is Southern fried and brassy... enjoyable" (Los Angeles Times).

Reeling from the loss of her mother, plagued with a bad case of writer's block (and don't even talk about that extra twenty pounds), Renata DeChavannes feels like everything is just plain wrong. And that was before the tabloids caught her sweetheart, filmmaker Ferg Lauderdale, sharing an intimate squeeze with Hollywood's hottest young tamale.

But the granddaughter of the formidable Honora DeChavannes possesses more hell than belle in her backbone—and she's about to reclaim it. Heading south to Honora's home on the Gulf Coast, Renata is determined to stop feeling like a wilted gardenia and emerge as the unstoppable kudzu her beloved grandmother proudly proclaimed she would be: I'll just tell you, Sherman may have burned the South, but kudzu will engulf it. But for that to happen she's got to face some not-so-genteel ghosts from her past, discover the truth about the mother she desperately misses, and make peace with the first man who abandoned her and broke her heart -her handsome and distant father.

Available January 08, 2008 by Harpercollins