Author: Stephanie Wilds and Donna Thornton
Date/Time: Tuesday 05/06/2025 at 11:00 AM
Book: Floating Camellias (Rose Hill in Black & White) and The UnEGGspected Gift
Synopsis: Stephanie Wilds' is a layered story, simply told but not simple. With her clear-eyed memory focused on the sweep of societal change, she travels back to the origins of her family roots in the South Carolina horse country, revisiting the traditions and expectations that accompanied life among Aiken's upper class for a child of the sixties. Young Wilds spirals through Rose Hill, the elaborate garden estate of her great aunt where ceremony and strict rules of conduct collide with faltering fortunes, collapsing social barriers, and her artist mother's egalitarian compassion. The cross-cultural relationships between the author and the house and garden staff, as well as the surrounding community "outside the walls," are vividly etched with poignant tonal echoes of "Grey Gardens" and "The Help." In ways, hers was an idyllic childhood; in others, a harsh lesson in the reality of enduring racial and economic divides. For so many sensitive souls, escaping the conflict north or west is the only respite from conditions both intolerable and irreparable. For Stephanie, years away from Rose Hill brought her the skills and vision to return and “make things right.” Her painstaking restoration of the lost gardens – long in ruins and out of the family – as a hired landscaper in service with the original groundskeeper, is a triumphant march against the -isms that plague us. PLUS, a new, immediate favorite as Mother’s Day approaches, Donna Thornton’s "The UnEGGspected Gift." Illustrated with heart and charm by local artist Kay Rugh, the story follows a laying hen who yearns to be a mother only to see each day’s production whisked away, while her guinea hen neighbor – no fan of motherhood – rolls each of her potential babies out of her nest … until the kind farmer sees where the true mothering instinct resides.
Restaurant: Pawleys Tap House & Grill
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