Grace at Low Tide: Book

A haunting tale of stumbling faith, hard-won hope, white-knuckled love and a mysterious mercy.

Fifteen-year-old DeVeaux is now fifty miles form the place where she used to live--only fifty miles and five months since her blue-blood father declared bankruptcy. "Used to" was a graceful home in a historic Charleston neighborhood. Country clubs, cotillions, childhood friends, and a close-knit church group. "Now" is a run-down cottage on an island estate that is no longer in the family. A restaurant job, a cantankerous old truck, and mud on just about everything.

But something is wearing DeVeaux down. It's not living on the island, which is actually kind of interesting. And it's not missing her old friends, who have developed an annoying fixation on boys. What really bothers DeVeaux is that being "ruined" has changed her dad into an ill-tempered jerk, and her mother just tiptoes around him. If the good Lord has a plan for saving them, now might be a good time to start.

A gritty but gentle drawl of a story, Grace at Low Tide is a tender and evocative portrait of a young girl embracing womanhood. With southern society as her backgrop, Beth Webb Hart paints for us a hard-luck family scrabbling to find its heart again. It is a testimony to the small miracles of love and loyalty--the gifts of grace that manage to keep us all afloat, even at our lowest ebb.

Publishers Weekly

Critics of evangelical novels often talk about the dearth of literary fiction in the Christian market, but this debut from South Carolina native Hart comes close to that coveted adjective. DeVeaux DeLoach's Daddy has gone belly-up after one too many bad business deals, so the DeLoaches must quit their fancy Charleston digs for a small country cottage. DeVeaux has to pull out of her posh prep school and take a weekend job. Daddy grows progressively meaner throughout the book, screaming at the family, ordering DeVeaux's mother to get a job and cruelly mocking her plump physique. For her part, Mama is mainly worried that DeVeaux, now old enough to turn men's heads, remain chaste. DeVeaux is kept afloat by her Christian faith, a cousin and the youth group leader at her church. DeVeaux's charming narration is the book's greatest strength-readers will love DeVeaux like a sister by the end-and its greatest weakness, for she's still an adolescent but sounds implausibly wise for her age. Still, this is a promising novel by a lovely, gifted writer. (July 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.