The Wilde Women: A Novel [Hardcover]

Paula Wall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2007

Paula Wall, the national bestselling author of The Rock Orchard, returns with another witty, wise, and romantic tale of two sisters with a talent for seduction and the unfortunate habit of falling for the wrong man every time.

The Wilde sisters dove headfirst into this world on fire with life and expectation. With hair black as midnight and eyes blazing blue, they grow into truly irresistible women. But as well as being blessed with beauty and determination, the Wilde sisters are cursed with equal tastes for mischief and bad men. And both of these appetites always lead to trouble. Love either lifts a woman up or drags her down. When a Wilde woman dies, they don't have to dig a hole.

On Black Friday in Five Points, Tennessee, Pearl Wilde finds her sister, Kat, in the barn wearing both her favorite shoes and her fiancé. As quick to fury as she is to passion, Pearl leaves town immediately. She returns five years later a sophisticated femme fatale, with her claws sharpened like stainless steel and a demeanor so cool that the townspeople can no longer tell if she even has sweat glands. Slowly and deliberately, Pearl begins her revenge on Kat by captivating all the men of Five Points, but all the while never forgetting the one man who had the power to break her heart.

In The Wilde Women, Paula Wall once again bewitches the reader with humor, sass, smarts, and sensuality, creating a hilarious and beguiling world where sometimes the best revenge is forgiveness.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wall's second novel (after The Rock Orchard) follows two beautiful, smart, sexually provocative, self-assured sisters whose dalliances captivate their small Southern hometown. Five Points, Tenn., has been brought low by the depression, but the residents retain their interest in the Wilde sisters' feud, which began when Pearl caught her younger sister Kat inappropriately entertaining Bourne Cavanagh, Pearl's fiancé and the heir to a whiskey distillery empire. Pearl disappears and travels the world, sending Kat a tersely worded postcard every month. Sassy and brash Kat stays behind and toys with the town's menfolk, including Mason Hughes, whose wealthy family owns the shirt factory where Kat works. Pearl sashays home after a few years and opens a high-class bordello that caters to the rich and powerful, while Kat continues to entice and evade Mason. Vignettes about secondary characters bog down the momentum, and while some are whimsically entertaining, they are more distracting than narrative-enriching. Fans of Southern women's fiction will forgive the meandering plot and be drawn in by the author's wit. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Great Depression dealt a hard blow to Five Points, Tennessee, and young Pearl Wilde feels just as leveled when she finds her fiance in flagrante delicto with her sister, Kat. Pearl promptly leaves town, and speculation runs rampant in the years she's away. Various sightings are reported, and the postcards she sends her sister from all over the globe are read and digested by the gossip mill before Kat ever sees them. When Pearl finally returns, with all the glamour of Ginger Rogers and the mystery of Greta Garbo, the ornery people of Five Points are curious. When she decides to open a whorehouse, the overworked women are unhappy, and further angered when their lazy men are recruited to restore the old mansion Pearl has purchased. Each and every character in Wall's tall tale has a uniquely flawed personality, and Wall has a wonderful sense of place and an adept way with words, adding up to an enthralling novel. Maria Hatton
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1St Edition edition (April 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743496213
• ISBN-13: 978-0743496216
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,680,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hot Time in the Old South, February 17, 2009

By 

Dr. Jane Branam "powerpathtolove" (Charlotte NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wilde Women: A Novel (Paperback)

Pearl and Kat Wilde and all the Wilde women through the generations are beautiful and cannot seem to keep their panties on. However, it is not graphic or gross, just saucy and spicy. It is really interesting to picture a brothel turning the local economy around in a one horse Southern town that has seen better days. Enjoyable read even though you just want to shake the main characters sometimes and give them a good "talking to"! Power Path to Love

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What I want., November 20, 2008

By 

mark jabbour (Westminster, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wilde Women: A Novel (Paperback)

"A woman is like whiskey. She evaporates a little over time, distilled by disappointments and grief. One can never predict if the angels will take the best of her or the worst. Only time will tell if the woman that remains will be bitter, dispirited, or aged to perfection." (pg. 180) "The Wilde Women." Paula Wall (2007).

I loved this book, or more to the point--the characters in the book--or, more to a sharper point--the author, Paula Wall. She likes her women strong, as do I. She likes the sexual position of "girl on top," as do I. She likes the dynamic of attraction, as do I. She likes to look at history to get a framework for the present, as do I. She likes alliteration as a writing style, as do I. She understands cadence and gravity and momentum.

Reading about the making of whiskey in Tennessee during prohibition made me want to switch my spirit of choice from tequila to "Old Number 7"; hop in the Batmobile, drive to the Highland Rim near Nashville (that's enough of a direction for me), find this wild woman, sit down at her kitchen table, throw down two shots ... and see what happens.

Now isn't that THE definition of a good book? I would have given it five stars except for the abundance of clichés and the "Chit-Lit" ending. Nevertheless, it is a fine piece of work. There is a lot of truth in this story, and it opened my eyes to a question that has been eating at me: Why do women do what they do? Now I know the answer when it comes to mate selection.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE BEST I HAVE READ THIS YEAR. AMAZING BIT OF WRITING!, September 8, 2007

By 

D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wilde Women: A Novel (Hardcover)

When Paula Wall published her first novel, The Rock Garden, I read it and loved it and felt it was by far one of the best novels of that year. I was quite fearful that Ms. Wall was one of those one novel wonders and thought "what a shame." Fortunately my fears were for naught! With this second offering I truly feel the author out did even her first work, which I have said, is one of the best. This is good stuff here folks!

At first glance, the author could quite well be classified as a regional author as her novels take place in a specific geographical area. But, like Ferrol Sams (Run with the Horsemen, the first of his wonderful trilogy), Ms. Wall transcends geography and produces a work that most people, if not all people, can relate to. She is simply an excellent, gifted writer and a true master story teller. If, after reading the first five pages, your sides are not hurting from laughter, then something has to be wrong with your sense of humor. This lady is funny. Her one liners are beyond a doubt some of the best I've read in years.

This is a novel of the depression south. It is not a "romance" novel, a "bodice ripper" nor is it a "historical romance." It is the story of a small town in the south during the depression years. Yes, there is an element of romance woven into the story, fear not, but this simply in not what this work is about. The author hangs her story on two sisters, which are great characters, but are only a small part of the novel as a whole. We meet page after page of vivid characters. The author has a skill which allows her to, in one paragraph, convince the reader that they have known a character all of their life. The twists and turns of this story are absolutely amazing and complicated, yet not so complicated that it does not all make perfect sense as you read on. Even though the story and plot are wonderful, they are almost over shadowed by the author's keen sense of character development. In this work we have probably at least a dozen story lines going and they are all wonderfully interlinked as are the quirky characters sprinkled here and there. The ending of this work...well, you just have to read that yourself, but trust me, it is great. Like another reviewer here, I recommend you go ahead and buy this one as you will no doubt want to give it a reread. I cannot wait for her next work to come out!

Recommend this one highly.