That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers since, I can remember everything. I remember the day summer started.
So begins Lee Smith's disarming first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Hollins College and a winner in 1968 of the Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, set in a small...