The Three Miss Margarets - ISBNLookup.com

Beth Kephart

Shaffer's novel begins with a homey, Southern narrative voice that rapidly crescendos into lively, resounding chatter. A former soap opera actress (Ryan's Hope, All My Children, Shaffer has a knack for building complex characters with clever, cutting lines. The three Margarets of the title are an elderly trio of unmarried women who, three decades before the novel opens, participated in an illicit act that they've managed to keep secret until now. Just what that secret is, and how it will affect other members of their cloistered Georgia town, is the engine that propels the narrative forward. Shaffer relies on multiple points of view to tell her story. Ultimately, it is this fractured quality, combined with the melodrama of the plot, that prevents the book from being as good as it might have been in Shaffer's entertaining hands.

Publishers Weekly

Three elderly white Georgia women, all named Margaret, share a deep friendship and a dark secret in this winning debut by actress and television writer Shaffer. For reasons not entirely clear even to her, Laurel Selene McCready has inherited her mother's grudge against "the three Miss Margarets," upstanding icons in rural Charles Valley. Returning home drunk late one night, she spies the three ladies congregating unaccountably in a deserted cabin. The body of Vashti Johnson, a renowned African-American geneticist who had returned to Charles Valley to visit her mother, is soon discovered in the cabin, prompting an investigation by the police, as well as by Laurel Selene and her new boyfriend Josh, a journalist who's writing a book about Vashti. As the three Miss Margarets struggle with how much to reveal about Vashti's life and death, they also reflect on their own longtime intimacy and on the race hatred in their community that led, decades ago, to a series of ghastly crimes. Shaffer's achievement is making each Miss Margaret a complex character with a fiercely guarded interior life. She doesn't belabor the social forces that defined the lives of these doyennes; instead, she gradually reveals Dr. Maggie Harris's lesbian love life, Margaret (Li'l Bit) Hanning's decadelong affair with a redneck gardener and Peggy Garrison's embattled domestic arrangement. Sometimes Shaffer leans too much on heavy-handed foreshadowing, and the secondary characters are thin, especially Laurel Selene and Josh. Yet the three Miss Margarets are wholly imagined, rich creations whose reticence speaks volumes about their time and place. Agent, Eric Simonoff. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Old murder haunts a rural Georgia community, in a debut from TV writer and soap actress Shaffer. Some think the three Margarets know what happened—but the old ladies said all they had to say a long time ago. A New York journalist working on a book about the world-famous scientist Vashti Johnson, who grew up in Charles Valley, picks up Laurel McReady, a major-haired divorcée with a big mouth, at a bar and gets her to explain. She starts with the story of L’il Bit (a.k.a. Margaret Elizabeth), the hopelessly plain, too-tall, galumphing daughter of Harrison Banning III, whose radical politics and NAACP membership scandalized everyone in town. Then there’s Dr. Maggie, an in-the-closet lesbian, whose do-gooding knows no color. (Maggie’s childhood friend Lottie was black, and Maggie never got over her guilt about getting a fine education when Lottie couldn’t.) These two befriended the much-younger Peggy, a white-trash goddess, after she was raped by Grady Garrison, a brute whose rich parents always indulged him. Later, she married Grady’s father, old Dalton Garrison, who never knew about the rape until years after their May-December union. Moving right along, Laurel explains that her ne’er-do-well father died mysteriously on the same night as Richard Johnson, who married Lottie’s daughter Nella. Richard Johnson, black and proud in a way that got white folks riled, was run over after an altercation with Grady, apparently over the favors of sweet but stupid Nella, who left town with her own daughter, Vashti, shortly thereafter. The three Margarets saw to Vashti’s education, and the smart little girl grew up to become a brilliant scientist. But she came back home, dying of brain cancer, tocommit suicide, and it’s been whispered that the three Margarets were there when she did. Eventually, Laurel gets out the whole story of the three old ladies, in mind-boggling detail. First fiction endangered by a life-threatening case of exposition.