Beth Webb Hart Adelaide Piper

Adelaide Piper

Beth Webb Hart

WestBow, Jun 2006, $13.99

ISBN: 159554027X

In Williamstown, South Carolina Adelaide Piper has always wanted to attend a prestigious college to develop her poetry skills. Thus when she is accepted by the elite liberal arts Nathaniel Buxton University, she is euphoric. However her elation turns sour as she is disappointed to find the Virginia university is a party school.

Still Adelaide makes the best of a bad situation even after a student dies in a hazing incident. She goes out on a date, but that turns nasty as the boy demands she put out for him. Adelaide feels alone as her father is preoccupied with making a zillion dollars through a pyramid like scheme and her mother struggles with raising her two other wilder daughters without any paternal help. Her two best friends also struggle with life's curveballs. Adelaide turns to religion as she tries to better understand why life seems so cruel.

Though too much is piled on as Adelaide, must be the Job-magnet with so many ugly things happening to her family and friends, her return to religion is deftly handled and realistic as she serves as the focus of this fine story line. Her family members and her two friends face personal crisis that isolate Adelaide further and the university is a disappointment as she selected it to learn. Beth Wenn Hart writes a top quality character study in which the heroine's finds spiritual salvation and solace in God.

Harriet Klausner