The Belle of Camden County

the long version

Lilly Hastings is a happily married woman and a devoted mother to two young children. However, a fateful trip to St. Augustine, Florida to attend a cousin’s wedding in 1921 has set off a chain of events leading Lilly to discover that she was not born into the white upper class family who raised her and is instead the illegitimate daughter of the mixed race seamstress who was tailoring her cousin’s wedding dress. While situations like this are fairly commonplace and accepted today, in the Old South of the 1920s, it was cause for scandal, divorce and social ruin. This story follows Lilly as she tries to keep her newfound knowledge of her true ancestry a secret from her family while desperately wanting to find her birth mother. Meanwhile, Lilly’s husband Michael is dealing with his own issues. Not only is he bewildered by his wife’s unexplained temperamental behavior, but a visiting movie producer is interested in putting Michael’s prize stallion Bravo in his latest film which will require a cross country train trip to California. In the young, thriving movie capital of Hollywood, Michael gets a firsthand look at the film industry while encountering both hostility and temptation. With a narrative that takes the reader to several cities across the USA, this book is an easy, quick read. "The Belle of Camden County" is a sequel to "Yella Gal: Queen of the Montclair". However, this book is written so that the reader need not have read the first novel in order to follow the storyline.