Chesapeake song Book

Tamra Wells has loved Charles Lane since her early teens, and he has loved her. The only child of a school principal and his socially ambitious wife, Tamra didn't let love keep her from her goal to become a scientist. She went on to college and then to Paris where she worked for five years before returning home, a beautiful and worldly woman ready to marry Charles, a brilliant young man in a family that owns more land than any other African-American family in Nanticoke, Maryland. This passionate and elegantly written novel is the story of a man and a woman who love each other and have everything except what they really want: a happy marriage. It is also the story of two families that are strong and loving, yet have their problems. Seth Wells, Tamra's father, is a respected school principal whose drinking habits create tension at home. The family stays together, but Tamra like many children of alcoholic parents, suppresses an anger that she can't verbalize. Charles's father, Harlen Lane, is a man of tradition who expects his sons to follow him, and Charles does, forsaking his own dreams of becoming a major league baseball player, to run the family farm. He takes on the task with a vengeance, determined to expand the modest business into a major agricultural complex. Two successful people raised in stable families, neither Charles nor Tamra see how closely they mirror the patterns of their parents' successes and failures. Despite their early - and continuing - passion over the thirteen years of their marriage they find themselves too often angry and resentful to see their own children frightened by the tensions of their otherwise comfortable household. Does their failure stem fromCharles's relentless drive to succeed in business? Does it take its toll from a death in the family? Is a lecherous relative a contributing factor? Or is it all simply the let down of a college-educated woman who fears becoming "just a housewife"? Chesapeake Song is an uplifting reminde