Thank you to Readers' Favorite for awarding Mourning Dove with the Bronze Medal!

Style and substance are the two necessary ingredients any book must have. This book exemplifies both. I was charmed and delighted by the author’s descriptive abilities. Her use of language, metaphors, turns of phrase kept me turning each page. She can make a table sound interesting.
I now know what it was like to be a Southern Belle. There’s a lot going on more than meets the eye, which is why this is so engrossing. The reader is dropped into the life of the upper crust, replete with a big back story and complicated family life. What characters they are. Posey, the mother, is all about refinement and a survivor. Finley, the bother of narrator and protagonist Millie, is a compelling, complicated, charismatic, enigma, bearing a resemblance to Holden Caufield. Then there is the Colonel; let’s just say he doesn’t come across as a nice guy. There are other supporting characters and they all move the story along.
I enjoyed reading every sentence, and some of them are downright extraordinary and wise.
Claire Fullerton is a bright new star. I’ve read her last two books, and they are great, but this one is a masterpiece.

I loved Mourning Dove from the minute I started reading it! Claire has a wonderful way with words and her description of each character leaves you rooting for them throughout the book. I couldn't put it down!

In her moving novel Mourning Dove, Claire Fullerton borrows a page from Southern Gothic writers like Flanner O’Connor and Carson McCullers, giving us an insider’s look at a family’s bumpy return to their Southern roots. For Millie, the teen protagonist and narrator, compared to unrestrained Minnesota, 1970s Memphis is a minefield of genteel manners and unwritten protocol, where even minor missteps carry damning social consequences and the likelihood of a scolding or worse. Navigating these constricting waters would be tough sledding for even a perfect family, which hers isn’t. Rocked by addiction, divorce, and her mother’s hasty second marriage of convenience, Millie’s world revolves around her supremely talented and equally fragile older brother, Finley. Cultures clash as the siblings struggle to forge their unique identities at a time and place where conformity to outdated values matters more than personal freedom and happiness.

While she does a first-rate job delineating the troubled siblings, their coquettish mother, dour step-dad, and stoic household staff, the author’s real triumph lies in her ability to make us see, hear and breathe the atmosphere of upper crust Memphis, where appearances are paramount even when they mask a sense of family and society in decay. If you’re a fan of southern sagas or just a reader looking to experience some place new, Mourning Dove won’t disappoint.

You guys, book FOMO (fear of missing out) is a thing! And books like Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton only feeds that FOMO. Fullerton is a new-to-me authors, but boy, oh boy, did she make a big and lasting impression!
Readers are taken through a tumultuous childhood through Millie Crossan. While things started out almost idyllic for this young lady in Minnesota, times changed. Situations and poor choices from others around her upend young Millie’s sense of security. And when the family trades Minnesota for Memphis, appearances become even more important than nurturing.
Fullerton delves into some of the dangers of burying and hiding emotions, dysfunctional family life, and what happens when the person held as a hero falls from their pedestal. Millie’s unique voice, influenced by southern gentility, often . reads like poetry. It’s her inner struggles and questions that drew me to her and her story.
A simple sentence within the first pages of Mourning Dove invested me in the lives of Millie and her family. And it happened more than once—one sentence that kept me from setting down the book until the very end.
This is not an easy read. It’s real, it’s raw, it’s life. But the emotional journey is well worth the ride.

I found myself staying up til almost 2:00 a.m., unaware of the time because I was so swept away with Millie and Finley and family. It's been a long time since I've had that special teenage-summer-night-lost-in-a-book experience. The cicadas and tree frogs outside my bedroom window only heightened my appreciation.

I love books that take place in the south and exemplify southern living. Mourning Dove didn't disappoint me. Claire Fullerton descriptive ability in writing makes her distinctive and masterful. Along with her proficiency in descriptions is her character development. The brother-sister relationship between Finley and Millie was the foundation of her story. The mother Posey was the typical aristocrat of southern society. The story is gripping as your ride the highs, lows, and even the humor. Definitely, a page-turner.

A very well-written, achingly beautiful novel. Ms. Fullerton has a way with the written word. Life as Millie knows it continues to collide with life as she hoped it would be. I could not put it down.

This is a must read for anyone growing up in the magical south or ever having been captivated by its generational traditions. I lived in Memphis during the 70's and 80's and recognize many of the fabulous landmarks that make The Bluff City who it is. The author tells a raw , yet tender, saga of one family's journey through the eyes of a vulnerable young girl evolving in to a strong and still vulnerable young woman. I became several of the characters,as each was introduced and captured my heart. Claire Fullerton combines the art of story telling with the likes of Pat Conroy, and the true southern ranks of society as Kathryn Stockett. Thank you for a perfect summer read that will take a front row in my library to be reread again.

I encourage anyone who has not yet read Claire Fullerton's novel Mourning Dove to get a copy today!! This book had me spellbound from start to finish. Claire's writing prowess quickly captivated me and I too became part of her novel. I was immediately transformed back in time to the 1970's in Memphis, Tennessee. I felt a kindred spirit with all the characters in this novel, especially the main characters Millie and Finley. Each character plays a pivotal role in Claire's story to beautifully articulate and exemplify love, loss, heartache, survival and redemption. Bravo Claire! Well done!!

Some books simply leave you breathless because they conjure up your own memories. Mourning Dove did that for me. The author had me from page 14:

"The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother's Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything...."

I could also speak of the novel's gorgeous, sensory prose, unforgettably detailed secondary characters, and the subtle yet sure way the author leads you to the novel's climax and conclusion. Yet the reason this novel will remain with me forever is that it echoed my own Southern experience.

Millie and brother Finley (who's her ally and superhero) come to Memphis from Minnesota by way of divorce. I came to the South (and Memphis was my first stop) from Chicago. I was accepted, because my mother and father were South Carolinian with the signature of the Swamp Fox stamped on their yellowing parchment land documents--but I was not necessarily approved of. I very soon learned to be seen and not heard.

I identified with Millie in a way I haven't any other character. Being the youthful outsider, Millie sees a lot about the Seventies-era South that most, having lived there for generations, choose to overlook. Her insights struck at my own heart like a bell, calling me home...home to myself. The South was a lot of things, but it was never as it appeared, and it left some people resilient and brave and others, it crushed. This is the story of both kinds of people. This is a novel of how grief unexpressed and words unspoken can tear you apart, no matter where you're from.

If you want to learn more about the South and its culture, about a South in an agonizing transition that no one spoke of, and perhaps has now forgotten, if you want to understand what makes Southerners unique, about how the South follows you around the globe once it's touched you, read Mourning Dove. If you want to experience the loving ally you had in your male sibling, pick it up also. And, especially, if you want to read a novel about a female character that stays with you, read Mourning Dove.

As a Memphian now New Yorker, a voracious reader, a librarian, I looked forward to reading Claire Fullerton’s Morning Dove. I had planned to read a bit of it every day, but could not help but read it very quickly. Even if I hadn’t so closely identified with the landscape of Claire’s characters, I would have loved this book because it’s gorgeously crafted and written. Claire has drawn a vivid description of coming of age in Memphis in the 1970s within the framework of privilege and dysfunction as her narrator navigates the heartbreak of a tragically flawed father, the complexities of a beautiful, social mother and her great love for her talented, bigger than life brother. She paints pictures of beautiful parties, good friends, great music with an under layer of sadness and grief that left me in tears. It’s a big, beautifully intense book with many layers. I look forward to picking up Mourning Dove again in the future to read it more slowly and deliberately. It’s that good.

Read this book in one long flight because I couldn’t put it down. The author’s main character, Millie, bravely reveals the strengths, secrets, idiosyncrasies, and rigid patterns of a southern family trying to keep a happy face on a painful past and present. Her description of the psychological response to traumatic news is vivid and evocative. It’s a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately heartbreaking story as Millie tries to figure out her new southern culture, her talented yet enigmatic brother, and her relationship to God set amongst bookends of tragic loss. Her quest is to “master the ambiguities of life”, which just may be the goal for most of us.