Bringing Abundance Back

Virginia Foster finds herself a retired empty nester in her hometown of Abundance, a small city in Upstate South Carolina. She and her husband are affluent members of the community, but she is concerned about its future and spearheads a festival to bring attention and jobs back to Abundance. As she and her team of fellow retirees work to build a successful festival—based around biscuits because the town got its name from Abundance Mills Flour Company--they face opposition from a local preacher, the art community, and the town’s maven of baby beauty pageants. However, Virginia has matters to deal with at home. Her aunt, Zadie, and her aunt’s dear companion, Topie Jackson, are the two women who raised Virginia after her own mother disappeared when Virginia was four. Both now live in an assisted living facility in town, but Topie, who grew up as the child of Lula, Zadie Cleeland’s family’s housekeeper, is losing her memory to dementia. The story tracks the lives of the two older women, one white, one black, and parallels Virginia’s discovery of some important family secrets even as she is trying to give the town the shot in the arm it needs—or she believes it does.