Karin Gillespie
BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR
(Simon and Schuster, 2004)
Welcome to the Bottom Dollar Emporium, where everything from coconut mallow cookies to Clabber Girl Baking Powder costs only a dollar, and coffee and gossip are free.
For Elizabeth, Mavis, and Attalee, logging nine to five at the Bottom Dollar is not just work time, it’s family time. So when news gets out that the Super Saver Dollar Store chain plans to set up shop and run the Bottom Dollar out of town, things go catawampus. Manager Elizabeth, who has a good head for business even though she flunked pin-curling in beauty school, teams up with a crew of dedicated do-gooders bent on saving the Bottom Dollar from the fate of spare change. But when Elizabeth’s unlikely new love interest — who also happens to be Cayboo Creek’s wealthiest bachelor — pitches woo, out come some startling revelations about her past that turn life more than a little interesting for all her friends and neighbors.
A DOLLAR SHORT
(Simon and Schuster, August 2005)
It isn’t every day a movie star steals your husband. When that day comes for Chiffon Butrell, of Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, she looks to the Bottom Dollar Girls to help her out of one fine mess. As a waitress at the local Wagon Wheel restaurant, Chiffon pegs her fortunes to a winning entry in a local video store’s Be-a-Movie-Star contest. But her celluloid dreams are dashed when her baby takes sick and her husband, Lonnie — one fine specimen of Southern manhood — heads for the Hollywood Hills solo. On set, he turns the head of leading lady Janie-Lynn Lauren, whose siren call is Oscar caliber. Back in Cayboo Creek, Chiffon manages to lose her temper and her job in quick succession — only to discover that Lonnie’s paycheck from the Nutra-Sweet plant has been forwarded to a California address. With three kids to feed, Chiffon comes up more than a dollar short. Her good friends try their best to pitch in. But there are too few hands to lend, what with Elizabeth and her husband, Timothy, expecting their first baby any day and the rest of the Bottom Dollar Girls knee-deep in their secret — and possibly scandalous — plan to raise money for the Cayboo Creek Senior Center. When a slick of Wesson Oil at the Winn-Dixie gets the better of Chiffon’s ankle, there’s just one thing to be done — call on estranged older sister Chenille, who hails from Bible Grove, South Carolina. A prissy, fussy spinster prone to dressing her dog, Walter, in matching plaid “”mother-son”" outfits, Chenille is everything former beauty queen Chiffon detests. Suddenly the tabloid media gets wind of Janie-Lynn and Lonnie’s torrid romance, landing sleepy Cayboo Creek on the star map. Under the glare of camera lights, the sisters must put aside their longtime grievances to forge a newfound relationship. As crisis reigns, Chenille is welcomed by the Bottom Dollar Girls for her cool head and quick thinking. And when Chenille runs into a little trouble of her own, she begins to see the future in friendship. A rollicking, hilarious novel about two sisters who are each one of a kind, A Dollar Short is a delicious page-turner worth every last cent
DOLLAR DAZE
(Simon and Schuster, 2006)
Moons and Junes are the flavors of the month for the Bottom Dollar Girls, whose sudden fondness for wooing and cooing has them in a Dollar Daze. From the night of the Sweetheart Dance, love begins blooming all over Cayboo Creek. Though every rose must have its thorn, it’s up to the Bottom Dollar Girls to follow their hearts.
Leading the way is Attalee, soda jerk at the Bottom Dollar Emporium, who’s so hot and heavy with her beau, Dooley, that the pair seems headed for the altar via Thrill Hill. Elizabeth is pining for her newlywed days when she felt more like a wife than a mother, while widowed Mavis has been up nights nursing a case of loneliness. Not so for newspaperwoman Birdie. “I’m glad my
dating days are done,” she claims, and Gracie Tobias agrees that she, too, is “done with romance.” They couldn’t be more wrong.
When high school heartthrob Brewster Clark returns to Cayboo Creek, suddenly Mavis and Birdie are competing for the attention of a certain pair of emerald eyes. Then there’s Rusty, a philosophical duct doctor who’s a most unlikely gentleman to turn proper Gracie’s head, until she finds that his charms work on her like the Fountain of Youth. “A match made in heaven,” Attalee pronounces the couple, but has she spoken too soon?
When it comes to love stories, “happily ever after” might always be the best ending, but one that can never be taken for granted. Traveling love’s rocky road keeps the Bottom Dollar Girls asking, “How can you still believe in romance?” In Dollar Daze, these best of friends through laughter and tears discover that endings sting, but the pain makes new beginnings that much sweeter.
