Plantation

Plantation by Dorothea Benton Frank. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780739417034.

When Caroline Wimbley Levine learns that her mother, Miss Lavinia, has supposedly gone mad, she leaves the big city bustle of Manhattan and returns to Tall Pines Plantation. Caroline originally left Tall Pines to escape her feisty, eccentric mother and her drunken brother, Trip, but when Miss Lavinia dies, Caroline is forced to come to terms with her familys troubled history as well as her failing relationship with her husband. As Caroline reminisces about her past rebelliousness and her childhood, she realizes that her fathers sudden and tragic death many years before served as a catalyst for the familys disintegration. Caroline and Trip also learn that their seemingly selfish and self-assured mother was not so uncaring after all.