Ro Grandee is the perfect Texas housewife. She's determined to be nothing like her long-missing mother, the one who left her with only a heap of old novels and her father's fists for company, so Ro keeps quiet and takes her husband's punches like a lady. But Ro wasn't always this way. Underneath her pastel skirts and hidden bruises lies Rose Mae Lolley, teenaged spitfire, Alabama heartbreaker, and a crack shot with a pistol. Rose Mae is resurrected when a gypsy's tarot cards foretell doom for dutiful Ro: her handsome husband is going to kill her. Unless she kills him first.
Armed with only her wit, her pawpy's ancient .45, and her dog Fat Gretel, Rose Mae hightails it out of Texas. In a journey that is by turns harrowing and exhilarating, she uncovers long buried truths about her family and herself, running from the man who will never let her go, on a mission to find the mother who did.
Some of the plot points from Joshilyn Jackson's Backseat Saints are farfetched to say the least, but the underlying themes of abuse, abandonment and the struggle to be true to one's self are all too real. I was taken in by Jackson's words and the sympathetic Rose Mae/Ro/Ivy and until the last page I was on the edge of my seat to find out just how things would end up for Rose Mae. And while some of Ro's decisions are sometimes hard to understand she came across, to me at least, as a character worth rooting for.
Have you read Backseat Saints? What did you think?
