How is THE PAINTED LADY OF SHALLOT like THE LADY OF SHALOTT, Tennyson’s ancient maiden who dared not go to Camelot? Let me count the ways. Some, for now at least.

Crystal lives in the small town of Shallot, Mississippi in the early 1990’s, in what people there call her ivory tower. She’s alone and works hard like the early “weaving lady.” Like her earlier counterpart, she knows a world is outside her hedges; in fact, she works at the brickyard, which produces no bricks, but is only a waystation. Crystal fights the invading wild shallots in her garden which creep from the Broad Stream River’s bottomlands and give her town its name.   But her world is the ancestral three acres left to her by her father, artist of reknown, along with the problems he was beset with.

Crystal is soon going to be involved in her own new set of problems. But her old ones are myriad. Oh, yes, she has a curse on her, too, also unknown, but is in front of her if she will only look.   

More on her tomorrow. But the book won’t be available until June 1.