New in Southern fiction; The Headmaster's Darlings : A Mountain Brook Novel  by Katherine Clark. Forward by Pat Conroy. This book deserves a fanfare! Katherine Clark is the author of  the Eugene Walter biography Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet.
Now she's written a comedy of manners about Mountain Brook, the one-percenter neighborhood of Birmingham, and Mountain Brook Academy, starring its larger than life headmaster Norman Laney. The darlings in the title are his students, but also the society ladies who support and finance his dreams of defeating "the barbarians" and turning Mountain Brook into a temple of civilization. Truman Capote's hold on his "swans" was small potatoes compared to the way Headmaster Laney handles these ladies. Of course, his whole raison d'etre is to get as many of his students into Ivy League or Ivy-League level colleges as possible.
To top it all off, it's a series! The forthcoming titles are: All the Governor's Men, The Harvard Bride, and The Ex-Suicide. All from University of South Carolina Press. If you live down here you've got to read these books.