A Word From Jennifer Kuzara, Woven Branches Creative Editor
Some books you edit. Others edit you. Periwinkle Blues is the latter.
If you haven't spent time in Noeware, Georgia yet, let me be the first to warn you: it might become your new obsession. This is the type of story you might at first call a guilty pleasure, but it won't feel guilty for long. There's nothing guilty about falling in love with Noeware and the people who live there.
G.L. Yancy's Woven Branches series is the kind of story your grandma watched between episodes of The Price is Right and Oprah; a soap opera world full of love, drama, secrets, and more than a little danger, set in a very specific corner of the South where old ways and modern life rub reluctantly against each other and things get messy in the most delicious ways. But to call it a soap opera fails to do justice to the rich characters Yancy develops.
What makes G.L. Yancy's writing so quietly extraordinary is what it doesn't do. There are no frills, no dramatic flourishes, no hand-holding. The prose is spare and unadorned, and somehow, with a few strokes of a pen, he creates vividly realized portraits of a cast of compelling, flawed, audacious, sympathetic characters you will want to follow forever. They are allowed to be fully themselves. No punches pulled, no easy resolutions.
If you've read any part of the series, you already know: nothing in Noeware (or Tennyson County for that matter) is ever what it seems. Periwinkle Blues takes that promise to a new level.
This installment is the deepest dive yet into the inner lives of characters you think you already know. Yancy has always written people the way they actually are: flawed, funny, complicated, often infuriating. And in Periwinkle Blues, several of them crack open in ways I genuinely did not see coming. We get glimpses of who these people were before we met them. Some characters are on the verge of rewards they have spent a lifetime earning. Others—good souls, ones you're rooting for—take hit after hit. Pasts surface. The ground shifts under a character's feet, and yours along with them. I set this manuscript down more than once just to collect myself.
I can't tell you what happens (that's the whole point!). But I can tell you that the mysterious get more mysterious, the villains get more villainous, more than one character is busy building illusions others will try to tear down, and at least one will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the world Yancy has built. This book will make you love these people more deeply, and fear for them more than you ever expected.
If you're already a Woven Branches reader, clear your schedule. You're going to need it. And if you haven't started the series yet, what are you waiting for? You have time to catch up before Periwinkle Blues arrives, and when it does, you'll be dying to know what happens next. Follow along for release updates and come join us in Tennyson County.
Just don't trust everything you see on the surface; in Tennyson County, anything could happen next.
"Woven Branches" (the book) What it is: A multi-book serial novel series titled Woven Branches, with the first book being The Road to Noeware.
Setting: The fictional, quirky town of "Noeware," Georgia. Plot: It follows a journalism student who uncovers dark secrets while investigating human interest stories in a small Southern town where modern society clashes with old traditions.
Themes: It explores a variety of dramatic and humorous themes, including love, sex, murder, and deception in a small-town setting.
Tags: Southern gothic, Southern book series, Woven Branches books, soap opera, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital, Beyond the Gates, EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Hollyoaks, Fair City, River City, Neighbours, Home and Away, Shortland Street, The Bold and the Beautiful, Waterloo Road, Days of Our Lives, Tales of the City, Generations The Legacy, Armistead Maupin, Fannie Flagg, Frieda McFadden, Alexander McCall Smith, LGBTQ fiction, queer fiction, indie authors Southern authors.
