Customer Reviews

A Dollar Short: The Bottom Dollar Girls Go Hollywood

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The Bottom Dollar Girls are back and better than ever. In this second book of the series, Chiffon's philandering husband Lonnie goes to California to be a movie extra and falls for the leading lady. The tabloids have a field-day reporting all of the details of their romance, while Chiffon loses her job, sprains her ankle, and tries to hold things together on the home front. Although Chiffon and her sister Chenille are not close, Chenille has also lost her job and she comes back to Cayboo Creek to help out her sister. Although their relationship is rocky at first, the sisters overcome their past animosities and stand together in the face of their over-critical mother and men who try to take advantage of them. The humorous sayings at the beginning of each chapter are worth the price of the book, and feel-good story is loaded with Southern humor and charm.

In Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, Wagon Wheel waitress Chiffon Butrell wins a video store's Be-a-Movie-Star contest, but cannot go to Hollywood because her baby is ill. Instead her handsome husband Lonnie heads west where he meets actress Janie-Lynn Lauren and forgets his wife and three kids back home.

Chiffon loses her job and she cannot pay her bills because Lonnie has had his paycheck sent to California. Her friends want to help, but they are distracted with other matters. Elizabeth is about to give birth and the remaining Bottom Dollar Girls sisterhood are busy raising money for the Cayboo Creek Senior Center. Chiffon turns to her estranged sister Chenille to help her with her crisis accentuated by the media descending on Cayboo Creek like vultures seeking dirt on Lonnie.

The sequel to the BOTTOM DOLLAR GIRLS, A DOLLAR SHORT is a fine look at modern life in a small rural southern community invaded by the outside world. The story line is amusing as the Bottom Dollar sisterhood goes about protecting their own, but also serious with the serious subplot of Lonnie abandoning his children besides his wife. Readers will appreciate this regional slice of life tale especially when the barbarian horde assaults the townsfolk who treat the outsiders like parasites that need special handling. This is one contemporary that is not A DOLLAR SHORT of fun.

Harriet Klausner

Who wouldn't love these books? Full of hilarious moments, you will read it one sitting. We have two sisters who haven't had the best relationship. When Chiffon wins a trip to Hollywood, she has purchased a new Kmart outfit, all ready to go. At the last minute, her youngest has a fever, and so she tells her husband to go ahead. Her husband Lonnie hasn't always treated her right, cheating on her and taking advantage of her. She finds out from the TV of all places that her husband is shacking up with Jay-Li. The media gets ahold of this story and has a field day with it. Chenille, Chiffon's sister, has never married and is a school teacher. Her teaching assistant thinks she has the green light to help discipline the children, wields a plastic machete, to scare the children. Chenille has been let go from her job because the assistant said she told her to do whatever was necessary to keep the children in line. Well Chiffon is stuck with her and Lonnie's three children, and has an accident in the grocery store after seeing tabloids with Lonnie and Jay-Li all over, spraining her ankle. Their mother is going to Europe and asks Chenille to assist Chiffon. Together they tackle the world, each ending up a little richer in love and life. I can't wait for the next one to come out.

I adored A Dollar Short and its lovable heroine, Chiffon Butrell! It is a hilarious southern romp, and once you start reading it, you will not be able to put it down until the very last page.

I love the kooky girls in this series and this one adds Chiffon's sister, Chenille. Chenille comes to town toting her terrier, Walter and causes quite a stir. I can't wait to see what happens in the next book!

I had just finished the first book in The Bottom Dollar Girls and I missed the "girls". So, I purchased this one. I read it in one day. It was a bit predictable but I still enjoyed it. These books are just fun and easy reads that will make you laugh out loud.

this book keep me on my seat laughing and wondering what the girls were going to do next.can't go wrong with this book or the other 2 in the series

The second installment of the Bottom Dollar Girls series was a quarter of a step up from Bet Your Bottom Dollar. The narration is in third person. We see much less of Elizabeth Polk; references to her family history are made, and that made me cringe! Instead, we learn about Elizabeth's best friend, Chiffon Butrell.

Lots of drama is happening in Cayboo Creek. Chiffon's husband, Lonnie, has abandoned his family to live with a movie star in California. The senior center is losing funds. Virgin Chenille Grace, Chiffon's older sister, is makes her identity through her teaching job, until she comes face to face with a new papraprofessional.

Lonnie and his new woman put Chiffon through living hell. While the fascination of the stalkerazzi is a bit overblown in some places, it's still very entertaining. Chiffon needs a lot of financial help, especially once she's injured. Thank goodness Chenille comes to the rescue. Chenille, who recently lost her teaching job for very believable reasons, helps her estranged sister. Chiffon and Chenille can count on the Bottom Dollar girls for help, and a few news ones, like Gracie Tobias.

Chiffon knows Lonnie isn't faithful, yet she's always seduced by his good looks. She can forgive him for sleeping with the town floozy, but this time, he has gone too far. We see Chiffon heart-broken and virtually penniless as she deals with the stalkerazzi camped outside her home. Chiffon becomes the focus of celebrity rags and tv shows. The class differences are duly noted, which is par for the course in the world of the rich and famous. Will Lonnie return to his family? Will Chiffon realize that he is a dirtbag? And what's the deal with his new girlfriend? We learn the answer to all of these, as well as gain insight into Chiffon's own history.

Chenille is so busy caring for family, will she ever find true love? She was always so plain that she never even had a date! Will things change now that she's back with Chiffon? Yes, Chenille becomes torn between two men: veterinarian Drake and country Garnell. Gillespie does not develop Drake's character much, which frustrated me. But, you'll soon see why he's a very flat guy. A very keep piece of the story. Garnell, on the other hand, is not the stereotypical southern guy that Gillespie included in the first book. What a relief!

And finally, what about the senior center? The gals devise a not-so-original plan for fundraising. (And Gillespie mentions where the plan originally hatched.) Will this plan work in this conservative town?

I found this book to be much more fun than Bet Your Bottom Dollar. This time, I found the answers to my questions within the prose. I had questions about Gillespie's writing style, but I now know why she did what she did in terms of character development. If you want to read a KAren Gillespie book, start with A Dollar Short.

This book begins with Chiffon, who has three kids and the bottom suddebly drops out of her life when Lonnie her husband, takes up with a movie star having an open affair. When Chiffon goes to the airport to meet Lonnie after a supposed "business trip," he is nowhere in sight. In disbelief, Chiffon has no choice but to return home with the bewildered kids, and finds a message on her machine from Lonnie that he is in love with someone else who's a hot actress, and he wants a divorce immediately.

And that is not the only thing wrong either. Chiffon has lost her job as a waitress at the Chat N' Chew after all these years, so now she is really up a creek for money and can hardly feed her kids without her snotty mother's help as she makes Chiffon feel more like a failure than ever.

Chenille, Chiffon's sister is having her own terrible problems with her own job as a schoolteacher for slow learners. Chenille's teacher assistant, who disapproves of everything about Chenille's classroom discipline threatens one of the students with a machete. Chenille gets the blame though for letting that happen, and is immediately fired from that high school for good. So she sinks deep into depression, not getting out of bed until her mother calls and pleads with Chenille to please come up to North Carolina to help Chiffon as she has broken her ankle and needs help with everything. So Chenille packs up her mutt Walter, and away she goes. She just knows things will get testy, as she has never been able to get along with her family, much less her sister before. There was a lot of sibling rivalry between them which the two never overcame.

Once Chenille arrives there, she gets the house in order. She settles in, and as time marches on, the two sisters become closer. Chenille meets a man, Drake who is a veternarian and he comes on to her immediately. But Chiffon doesn't like him, and sees in him a smooth character that would hurt Chenille deeply. Chenille doesn't listen to her sister's concerns, even as Drake wants to marry her in a hurry in Rome. She begins to suspect the kind of person he is when going through his apartment and finding clues to hidden secrets.

Garnell is a plain ordinary man that is down to earth and has always liked Chenille. However, it takes awhile and a bad experience with Drake before she sees this.

Lonnie reappears, and Chiffon is a big sucker and falls for his tactics once again.

Elizabeth, a character in the last book is happily married to Tim Hollingsowrth and had her first baby Glenda. She continues to help the Dollar Emporium grow in their business by leaps and bounds.

I am anxious to read the next one, Dollar Daze. This book made me laugh my head off in many places. Some of the other ladies are quite eccentric.

This series is very good...very funny escapades of southern ladies...I thoroughly enjoyed it..