![]() As it turns out, Mary is actually the daughter of one of the city's first families, the Sazeracs, but crazy old Aunt Celeste has kept her out of the way be. Innocent that she is, she barely escapes the tentacles of Rose Jackson, New Orleans' most exclusive madame, though handsome Creole planter Valmont Saint-Brevin happens to see her in the vicinity of Rose's and therefore assumes she's a lady of the night. But Mary has more pluck than the average girl, so she sets off to search out her true mother's family in old New Orleans. ![]() ![]() Sixteen-year-old Mary MacAlistair receives word, on the day of her graduation from convent school, that her papa has died, that her chilly mother isn't her mother at all but her stepmother, and that she's been cast adrift. ![]() And, as usual, her rendering of the historical scene is lush and entertaining, her New Orleans circa 1850 replete with everything you ever wanted to know about the Deep South, including a recipe for beans and rice, voodoo, yellow-fever epidemics, the Underground Railroad, dotty belles and cafÉ au lait-colored octoroons-all, of course, set to the soupy strains of melodrama. After a brief stint in Renaissance Florence, The Time Returns (1985), Ripley has come home to the Dixie of earlier efforts. ![]()
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