cover image The Girl Who Loved Elvis

The Girl Who Loved Elvis

Susie Mee. Peachtree Publishers, $18.95 (215pp) ISBN 978-1-56145-080-0

Mee's first novel focuses on an 18-year-old in the 1950s south; written in dispassionate, straightforward prose, it proves dry despite occasional mild humor. LaVonne Grubbs, who lives with her overcritical mother and works at a textile plant in Goody, Ga., first hears Elvis Presley's music while shopping in a five-and-dime. Instantly smitten, LaVonne starts an Elvis fan club, and it soon becomes obvious that major events in her life will parallel momentous points in the King's early career. In awkwardly managed coincidences, LaVonne's mother suffers a heart attack during Elvis's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show , while Presley's own mother dies shortly after one of LaVonne's coworkers loses the annual textile plant competition. Although Mee adequately conveys LaVonne's personality and blue-collar background, the novel never rises above its lackluster tone. LaVonne's fascination with Elvis is not developed in any depth, and there's little follow-through about her absent father, who left Georgia to start a new life in Detroit. Even LaVonne's longed-for sighting of her rock'n'roll hero seems anticlimactic. Hampered by a conventional plot and banal references to Elvis, the narrative plays a lethargic theme. (May)