Spotlight on Bookstores: *Wild Hare Books* in Signal Mountain, Tennessee

A great big SITFOB welcome to author Cathy Holton!

Cathy Holton’s fourth novel, Summer in the South, is recently available in hardcover. This is the story of a Chicago writer fleeing her troubled past who stumbles upon a sixty-year-old murder mystery in a small Southern town. As a guest of the prominent Woodburn clan, keepers of a violent past, Ava Dabrowski soon finds herself entangled in the tragic history of a mysterious Southern family whose secrets mirror her own.

She is the author of Beach Trip, Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes, and Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes all published through Random House/Ballantine.

Cathy lives in a small, quaint Southern town on a mountain ridge overlooking Chattanooga. In the following essay she writes about the town’s only bookstore, Wild Hare Books.

To learn more about Cathy Holton, visit her author website at www.cathyholton.com, follow her on twitter at @cathyholton or “like” the Facebook fan page for Summer in the South and enter to win a free copy of the novel.

And if you stop in to Wild Hare Books, be sure and say “hey” to Barbara. Tell her Cathy Holton sent you.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but I’ve always felt that buildings had personalities. Like people. You can walk into some houses and feel that a happy family has lived there; others, no matter how impressive or ornate, leave a cold chill on the back of the neck.

I knew from the moment I walked into Wild Hare Books on Signal Mountain that it was a happy place. Signal Mountain is a small, Mayberry-like town perched on the top of a mountain overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s a suburb really, but like many of Chattanooga’s suburbs, it sits atop a mountain ridge. We moved here from Atlanta twenty-five years ago and I was immediately entranced by the sleepy, nineteen-fifties “feel” of the place. Situated in a natural rain forest with outcroppings of limestone rock and winding streets with picturesque names like “Green Gorge” and “Whispering Pines” and “Blue Teal Lane,” I felt like I had come home.

When, in 1996 Wild Hare Books opened its doors, my happiness was complete. (Because what is a community without a good book store?) My children were ecstatic; they could ride their bikes to the town swimming pool and then stop by the book store on their way home. (Even now, 15 years later, it’s not unusual to walk into Wild Hare to find a group of children sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading quietly.) The book store, like the town of Signal Mountain itself, is small but filled with eclectic treasures. The selection of titles has been lovingly picked, not by some corporate marketing department with a quota to fill, but by a staff who knows their reading audience and picks their books accordingly.

Over the years Wild Hare has changed ownership several times, but the one constant has been Barbara Gray, the spry octogenarian staff member who has guided book buyers for the last 9 years. When asked, “What’s a good read? What do you suggest?”, Barbara always pauses, as if considering not only her recent reads but also her knowledge of the client doing the asking. And she doesn’t hesitate to encourage readers to look beyond their usual favorite genres or authors. (It was Barbara who introduced me to the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series years ago.)

I’ve done book signings for all four of my novels at Wild Hare. When our children were younger, my friend Peggie Hixson owned the store. Judy Young owned it next and it was Judy who gave me the recipe for the deadly Margaronas that featured so prominently in my novel, Beach Trip. (And yes, they are deadly but oh, so good.) When my new novel, Summer in the South, launched in May of 2011, Linda Wyatt, the new owner of Wild Hare, hauled boxes of books down to the bed & breakfast where I’d decided to host the launch party (and where she, thank goodness, sold a good number of copies).

So when I think of the cozy bookmobile where I spent so many blissful moments during my childhood summer vacations, I’m glad my children had Wild Hare. And I’m glad, too, that the tradition of summer vacation and reading continues to this day at the cozy little bookstore on Signal Mountain.

Because happy places, like happy families, are all alike….

To paraphrase another well-known author.