Unduly familiar with choosing between sides throughout her lifetime, Nonny Frett finds herself once again caught in the middle between an escalating family feud that began before her birth and the realization of her own dreams. By the author of Gods in Alabama. 75,000 first printing. *Starred Review* Jackson returns with a second quirky and touching novel abut the South. The story of a feud between two families from opposite sides of the tracks, it narrowly avoids the worst cliches and appropriately exploits the more interesting ones. Jackson has been compared to Fannie Flagg, and rightfully so; her characters are vivid and lovable, put in situations that are so hard to explain that it's just easier to pass the book lovingly along to a friend. In Between, Georgia, protagonist Nonny is the adopted child of the Frett family, a strong-willed, well-off, and women-run clan, but she is the biological child of the criminal and downtrodden Crabtree family. Her adoptive mother, Stacia, is blind and deaf, and Nonny falls into a career in ASL interpretation. To escape her hometown of only 91 residents, where everyone knows the story of her lineage, Nonny runs to nearby Athens and lives out a half marriage with a rock guitarist. Predictably, the strange and dramatic goings-on in Between draw her home over and over again, especially when her cousin leaves a baby daughter there for the family to raise without her. Nonny falls in love with young Fisher, and the cycle of untraditional mother-daughter pairings continues. A climactic ending with perfect story resolution makes this book tidy and uplifting, and even the most cynical reader will surely smile as the back cover closes. Debi Lewis Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved AUTHORBIO: JOSHILYN JACKSON lives with her husband and children outside of Atlanta, where she is currently at work on her next novel. There's "no such thing as a town smaller than Between," Joshilyn Jackson writes about the setting of her new Southern novel. It's not awfully far from Athens, Ga.; it's surrounded by pines and threatened by kudzu. Its major attraction is a museum devoted to porcelain dolls and butterfly farming: "a must-stop spot for the kind of people who liked to pack up a camper and go see freakishly large balls of tinfoil." Between is also the home of the Fretts and the Crabtrees, who are like the Montagues and the Capulets, only more eccentric. The Fretts are "meticulous to the point of mental illness," Jackson writes. If they ever cuss, they use only cuss-words that appear in the Bible. They have money; they create order. The Crabtrees, meanwhile, live in squalor and chaos, sloping in and out of common-law unions and borderline felonies. The primal Crabtree landscape is a helter-skelter vision of "rusted-out bodies of cars and partial cars, heaps of old lawn mowers, fridges, gas stoves, and chunks of various engines." Crabtree men don't ask for dessert; they holler, "Baby Jesus, but I [expletive] need some pie." A faithful summary of Between, Georgia would have to go on for pages to honor its enormous cast of quirky characters and its breathlessly intricate plot. But what you need to know is that the narrator, a spirited young woman named Nonny, was born a Crabtree and raised as a Frett. Her adoptive mother and aunts, in their tidy print dresses and orthopedic shoes, are naturally at odds with her Crabtree grandmother and a slew of redneck Crabtree cousins. But an attack by a vicious Crabtree dog brings the families together and sets the action going. There's also Nonny's husband, Jonno, physically irresistible and ethically deficient, from whom she'll be divorced as soon as they can stop having "goodbye sex" and get to their court date in Athens. Jonno plays in a rock band called X. Machina -- as in deus ex machina, an ancient Greek plot-resolving device that comes in handy when this book reaches full gallop. Jackson, whose first novel was gods in Alabama, has a gift for juggling a zillion movable parts. Adept at the kind of farce that requires characters to hide from each other in the bushes, she's also good at poignancy and at darker scenes of mayhem. There's so much back-story that it takes the reader a while to get oriented, but once you've got it straight, Jackson produces an astringently humorous performance. Though Between hasn't the emotional depth that occasionally enriched gods in Alabama, it's equally dotted with Southern "characters." A favorite: the airhead virago Amber DeClue. Please let Scarlett Johansson play her if there's a movie so she can deliver the line: "I have to go iron my hair." Reviewed by Frances Taliaferro Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.