Author Talk and Friends of the Library Fundraiser at South Community Library

Award-winning author Susan Beckham Zurenda will give a community talk titled “When Home is the Red Rose Motel” in relation to her new novel, The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, at the South Community Library on February 6 at 6:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public, and a percentage of book sales will go to benefit The Friends of the Library.

Inspired by the author’s teaching in a Spartanburg, South Carolina, public high school and knowledge of homeless students living in motels, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel revolves around two high school students from vastly different backgrounds who fall in love, and with the support of their sympathetic English teacher, attempt to navigate complications readers might never imagine.

Set in a fictitious Southern town in 2012, the novel is told from the points of view of protagonist Hazel Smalls, a bright but disadvantaged junior living with her family in a rundown motel; Sterling Lovell, a brilliant and advantaged high school senior; and Angela Wilmore, a stern but compassionate newly widowed English teacher confronting the multifaceted challenges high school teachers face in and out of the classroom each day. When he crosses the line with Ms. Wilmore by taking over her lesson, Sterling is punished with a day of in-school suspension. There, he meets Hazel, and an unlikely connection sparks. As the teenagers’ relationship develops and Hazel suffers ever worsening conditions at home, Ms. Wilmore—involved in a budding relationship with the divorced principal—is compelled to go beyond the role of teacher to become Hazel’s foster parent.

Hazel’s family once lived in a safe neighborhood with pleasant surroundings. Her father was gainfully employed in a truck-driving business with his brother while her mother brought in extra income cleaning houses. It all changed when Hazel’s father fell out with his brother and lost his job. The family became homeless with no alternative but to live week to week at the Red Rose Motel. During the course of the novel, the people and circumstances in Hazel’s life propel her from being a “scared rabbit,” as Sterling first thinks of her, toward a courageous maturity that engenders a bold and surprising decision at the novel’s end.

Zurenda’s debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition, March 2021), garnered a number of awards including Gold Medal winner in the 2021 IPPY Awards for Best First Book—Fiction. The Girl From the Red Rose Motel is a multilayered novel that will appeal to readers of love stories, coming of age novels, literary teacher stories, and remarkable alliances between adults and teenagers.