Pawpaw Patch

At forty, Chanell Foster is proud and popular in her hometown of Cornerville, Georgia. Her beauty shop is more than her business - it is the town's social hub - and one's status in Cornerville is ensured by a standing weekly appointment in Chanell's book. But life in a small southern town can change without warning. For Chanell, it begins when several of her regular customers fail to appear for their appointments one morning. By day's end her is salon is completely empty, as if the plague itself had been discovered there. Chanell doesn't understand the reason, but she sees a small-town social lynching when she sees one. Her best and truest friend, Bell, assures her that nothing is wrong, yet two of her closest friends since childhood, Joy Beth and Linda Gay, won't even look her in the eye. It is only after overhearing a hushed conversation that Chanell realizes the ugly truth: she is the focus of a hateful, racist rumor that has spread like wildfire through her small town. Where Chanell was once beloved, she is now outcast across racial barriers erected by her own friends and townspeople. . On the verge of losing her business, Chanell embraces the role of the anomaly in which the town has cast her. By giving Cornerville a dose of its own medicine, Chanell forces the town to turn its face to the mirror of hatred, leading to wonderfully poignant, ironic, and triumphant conclusion.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.