A self assured restaurant owner questions her need for independence after an event that turns her little world around. A theology teacher faces off with the town's notoriously evil good old boy. A fisherman ponders his paternal qualities with the help of dinoflagellates and memories of his tragic childhood. With genteel grace or with an aggressive distaste for convention, the people of Summerland wrestle with life's curve balls and nature's fortitude in this collection of short stories by Jennifer Lynn McCarthy. In the third book from the Southern Gothic Now series, vibrant characters handle life with the weight of their background on their shoulders. Their sense of place and home instinctively informs their choices, often with funny and touching results. The people of Summerland are naive, flawed, sensitive, and authentic. They may come from the moneyed homes of the South or from the dark corners of the Appalachians, but they are all from "that neck of the woods," - that place of odd quirks, old traditions, new changes, and gritty determination.