More than a rip-roaring good read about a feisty Southern girl tearing up her hometown, The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc is a poignant story about innocence lost and hope regained, about the dangers of taking a risk -- and playing it safe, about wresting control of your life before someone does it for you. Shifting back and forth in time, Loraine Despres limns an utterly captivating portrait of Sissy LeBlanc's tumultuous coming of age and her struggle to break free from the loveless, stifling marriage it led her to.

Sissy's downward spiral began in the fall of 1941. Her brother's death was still a fresh, painful reality. As her mother's illness worsened, Sissy's father disappeared emotionally from his family. Her boyfriend Parker Davidson's attention wandered to girls Sissy imagined were more "mature" than her. Desperate for affection and anxious to explore her nascent sexuality, she delves into a dangerous, obsessive affair with Bourrée LeBlanc that ends in rape and pregnancy. With one of Aunt Sarah's dirty, back-alley abortions being Sissy's only alternative, she bucks up and relies on her wits to create the best life she can. Fifteen years later, Sissy is married to Peewee LeBlanc -- Bourrée's son -- and the mother of his three children. She's bored, dissatisfied and scared that her life might never change. And when Parker blows back into town, she's petrified that her life will never be the same. As the illicit couple burn up Gentry's phone lines with devoted whisperings, readers learn that in this eccentric Louisiana town, nothing -- including family lineage -- is what it seems.