The Land of Mango Sunsets | Dorothea Benton Frank

The Land of Mango Sunsets | Dorothea Benton Frank | Mango Sunsets - An sbsolute delight to read - excellent dialogue

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The Land of Mango ...

	The Land of Mango Sunsets Dorothea Benton Frank Avon, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I so loved this book

Dorothea has such insight into the thing of the living and the dying. I am now quoting some of her books and this one imparticular. Thank you Dorethea for your depth of relationship and family. I hated to finish this book and felt as though I was there for all the glasses of wine, all the mending of fences and all the love and fun.

Mango Sunsets - An sbsolute delight to read - excellent dialogue

Dot Frank is a hoot to read. Her style is fast-paced and full of witty dialogue. She writes about the South Carolina Low Country - of which several writers here have been mentioning and placing their books in.

In The Land of Mango Sunsets, we find one middle-aged New York socialite - Miriam Elizabeth Swanson - still bemoaning her long-divorced husband who ran off 20 years ago with a lingerie model half her age.

Protagonist Miriam is also complaining that her adult sons are busy with their own lives and that she has little more than her long history of volunteer work to prop up her by now long- fading social standing. So when she decides to rent her townhouse to a suitable tenant, she has a great deal of trouble finding one who suits her persnickety profile.

Lawsamercy, Miriam would cry - she thinks she's found the perfect tenant in Liz Harper, a college admissions administrator, when she has the following discussion with her mother.

Miriam's mother is speaking.

Excerpt:

"Oh, Miriam. Honestly, sometimes you're such a prig."

"I am not."

Mother picked up our dishes and began cleaning up. "I love you. You're my only child. Trust me. You're a prig."

I snatched the sponge, rinsed it out, squeezed it, and began wiping down the countertop.

"Thanks a lot," I said.

"Miriam? Look at you! You're at the beach and what are you wearing? A silk blouse all tidy and tucked into your wool skirt, stockings, for God's sake, little heels with Pilgrim buckles, and pearls! Girl! We have to loosen you up! You need some fun in your life."

"Kevin says the same thing, but the last time I let Fun in the front door, it was wearing a thong and cavorting with the husband of one of my friends!"

"Your new tenant?"

"You don't want to know."

"Honey, I always want to know. Don't throw those vegetables away. I compose, you know. What's her name? This hussy."

I drained the broth and scraped the vegetables into a large can by the sink. I could feel my pulse picking up speed. "Liz Harper, lately of Birmingham. So you want to hear the story?"

"I said I did, didn't I?"

'Well, she seemed like just what the doctor ordered; you know, to add a little life to my otherwise dreary existence. At least Kevin seemed to think she was perfect. I had my doubts." Just thinking about it caused me to be short of breath...

..."I hate black cook tops. And granite. Can't see a bloody thing unless you lean into the light...Anyway, I thought it was suspicious that she worked at a college in a minor position and was able to afford to live on the East Side."

"Where?" Are you all right?

"I'm perfectly fine."

"Okay. What does she do?"

"Hunter College. Something in admissions, I think. So, then she tells me she bartends for a caterer and does some Nanny work. I mean, who does that sort of work?"

"Plenty of perfectly respectable people, Miss Priss."

"Whatever. Anyhow, the next thing I know, she's got Truman Willis upstairs in the sack with her, going wild. Ka-thump, ka-thump, all night long!"

"You could hear them?"

"Yes. Kevin says I should not go crazy and throw her out."

"He's probably right."

"He says she probably didn't know Truman was married."

"He could very well be right about that, too. But you could hear them?"

"Yes. Disgusting. I mean, here I am trying with all I've got to get Agnes, his wife, to appoint me the chair of the decorations committee for the museum's spring benefit. Let me tell you, since Charles ran off with that concubine of his, it has not been easy for me to maintain my social standing."

Mother started to laugh and I looked at her like she was certifiably insane. Funny thing, she was looking at me the same way.

"What?" I said. "Tell me what you see funny about this?"

"Oh, Miriam. Sit down. Let your mother give you some advice...."

..."Do you remember how insanely busy I was when your father was alive?"

"Sure."

"I was always chairing a gala or worrying about a raffle prize or trying to sell space in an ad journal. Remember?"

"I surely do. You were the one who taught me the value of volunteerism."

"Yes and it is terribly important. But I never depended on my volunteer work to influence or improve or secure my social standing in any way."

"That's not exactly what I meant."

"Yes it is. It is exactly what you are expecting! An able-bodied person has a responsibility to give back to their community. That's just good citizenship. But it was your daddy's money that gave me a highfalutin social life and I knew it from day one. Let me ask you something. Do you really think Agnes Willis is your friend?"

"Of course, she is! We've been friends for years!" I knew in my heart that my friendship with Agnes was finito but wasn't prepared to admit it.

..."Anyway, you don't have to answer me. Just ask yourself this. If you had the flu, would she bring you soup or call to see how you were? That's what friends do."

..."What's the point, Mother?"

"The point is that social pecking order in that world is nonsense - the way women bicker over napkin folds and a centerpiece is just ridiculous. But! It is noble, even personally fulfilling, to do good works. ...But that's not all there is to life, Miriam."

"It has been the framework of my life for so many years, I don't know what I'd do without it. It's what Charles loved about me - I mean, that volunteering gave us a marvelous life beyond his work and raising the boys."

"Charles is a shallow bastard, Miriam, pardon me. If you ran the biggest charity ball in New York, do you think it would bring him back to you?"

"No."

"If you were twenty years younger and skinny as could be, do you think that would bring him back?"

...."Why are we talking about this?"

..."Because you need to put this disappointment behind you once and for all."

"I have."

"No darling girl, Mother begs to differ. ...I see my wonderful, beautiful daughter, very unhappy, clutching at straws, trying to hang on to a life that isn't worth the effort."

"...Mother? ...What am I supposed to do?"

"Easy for you to say."

...Look, this gal, Liz? Don't use your passion all up worrying about her. Life is so precious Miriam. You have to realize that this battle cannot be won. Don't waste any more time, honey. That's all."

END EXCERPT

***

...So, if someone walked into Miriam's life - what do you think she would do? What do you think she should do?

Well, someone DOES walk into Miriam's life...and you have to read the novel to find out!

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I loved it!

THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS by Dorothea Benton Frank
May 15, 2008

Amazon rating 4 ½ stars

THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is a story that in part revolves around a woman and her relationship with her elderly mother, but it's mostly about a middle-aged woman who comes to terms with her life, and the relationships that are most important to her.

Miriam Elizabeth Swanson lives in New York. She's divorced, and rents out her apartment to help make ends meet. Her good for nothing husband had run off with a much younger woman and good riddance to him! Miriam's best friend is her gay renter Kevin, who is the only man in her life that she can trust and depend on. At the start of the story, she is trying to find another renter, to replace the one that had recently passed away. After much interviewing, Kevin and Miriam eventually agree on a young woman from Alabama, whom they feel will fit right in.

Miriam's personality is that of a very stuffy southern belle. The reader may assume at first that Miriam is an elderly woman by the way she behaves. Part of the story line has Miriam writing thank you notes obsessively and diligently, and I kept imagining an elderly spinster sitting at her desk. She writes these thank you notes for almost everything, and most of them have to do with the social groups she participates in, groups that at one time held her in high regard. But since the divorce, her standing has fallen. Miriam's husband had the money and evidently once the money left she was now considered a nobody.

Miriam's heart belongs in the south, in the Low Country. After discovering her new boarder is not as pristine and high class as she had hoped, Miriam goes home to escape and visit her mother, and soon her troubles melt away. However, when the new renter Liz encounters troubles of her own, Miriam brings Liz home with her to recuperate and to get some mothering as well.

While visiting home, Miriam meets her mother's boyfriend, a much younger man named Harrison Ford, of all names! Miriam notices her mother's changed lifestyle, too. She's eating organic, raising her own chicken for eggs, and basically she's a transformed woman. This southern-bred woman is now a hippie, thinks Miriam. Her mother must be crazy or it could be just old age.

With encouragement from her mother and Harrison, Miriam goes out with a man that Harrison was acquainted with, Manny, who brings out the wild side in Miriam, and she even accepts a new nickname, Mellie. Mellie loosens up her hair so to speak, and to the surprise of everyone she becomes a much less stodgy person and a more relaxed woman. However, she actually has her eyes on Harrison, but she knows Harrison is off limits.

Closer to home, Miriam regrets not having a strong relationship with her two sons. She had a falling out with one son due to the awful names he had given to his two children, and the other son Miriam wrote off because he moved in with a woman of color who also happened to be boring, and she wasn't even from this country! But something happens to alter Miriam's view on life. She vows to change. To prove that she's transformed into a new woman, when Miriam's son Charlie announces that he and Priscilla are finally getting married, she gives him the shock of his life by congratulating him and his fiancée, and opens up her arms and heart to both of them. Thus starts their adventure as they plan the wedding, and Miriam hopes that this wedding will be celebrated by the entire family, including her estranged son.

Ultimately, however, THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is about Miriam (Mellie), who starts off as a person that many people find harsh and stuck up and not very fun, and turns into a changed person. Her struggles to unite her family will strike a chord with many people, just as her relationship with her mother will bring out the tissues. I am going to say, without having read all of her books that THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is probably one of her best books yet. As a story told with humor (Miriam's bird is a riot!), a review of this book cannot fully describe the wonderful journey the reader will take as they start from the first page and end on that last happy, albeit sentimental, paragraph. THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is highly recommended. - courtesy of Love Romances and More - M. Lofton

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Good but I've read it before

I loved Dot Franks books, but I felt like I had read this before. So many things like Sullivan's Island. The characters were wonderful and the story was entertaining, but the sex and all was so much like all of her other stories. The sick mother was also in Sullivan's Island. The divorce also was in Sullivan's Island. I felt Dot just used the same story and changed a few things. It is time to leave South Carolina and New York and come out with some new ideas. I love her books but I won't rush to buy them like I once did. If you haven't read some of her earlier books, you will really enjoy this book; if you have you will feel like "been there done that"!

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