Main Street Reads

Bestseller Book Club in May Featuring The Rice Birds by Lindy Carter
2022-05-17 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Main Street Reads, 115 S. Main St., Summerville, SC, 29483, United States
Join us for an exciting book club evening on the third Tuesday in May when we’ll be chatting about The Rice Birds by Lindy Carter and come back two days later to meet Lindy in person and get your book signed by the author! The club meets live and all are welcome – we’ll bring the treats, you bring yourselves! The book is available at the 10% off book club discount, too!
Third Thursday will feature this very special book signing for The Rice Birds by Lindy Keane Carter, which NYT bestselling authors are already calling brilliant!
“Like the hunted rice birds of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, two desperate women—an Irish indentured servant and an enslaved servant—flee antebellum Charleston in this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted odyssey to freedom. I loved it.” – Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of 27 books, including THE BEACH HOUSE series
“In a poignant story of two runaway women who befriend each other in 1849 Charleston to survive, The Rice Birds will steal your heart. The starving Irish immigrant and the enslaved house servant battle a common enemy while seeking to find their loved ones snatched from their arms. Lindy Carter’s transportive prose will carry you through this compelling and splendid story.” –Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author
“Lindy Keane Carter is a captivating writer of historical fiction and a powerful storyteller. The Rice Birds has tension on every page, truth that shocks and exposes, and characters we come to love. I am a big fan of Carter’s writing talent, and her latest novel is a first-class winner!” – Leah Weiss, bestselling author of If the Creek Don’t Rise and All the Little Hopes
The Rice Birds: In 1849, twin sisters fleeing Ireland’s famine arrive at New York’s seaport. Only Nora is allowed to get on the boat to South Carolina to fulfill her work contract. On her employer’s vast rice plantation, an enslaved worker— Pearl—befriends her. After one of them commits a crime, the girls flee to Charleston, a dangerous place for runaways. Nora frantically seeks to get back to her sister, while Pearl tries to find her mother before heading north.
Meanwhile, an old enemy’s illegal scheme is about to derail the girls’ plans.
Historically accurate, this newly published work from Evening Post Books draws upon interviews with academics, historians, and educators, as well as dissertations, histories, Gullah stories, cookbooks, and the diaries of Lowcountry rice planters. The Rice Birds takes the reader beyond the well-known narrative about Charleston’s history to reveal real events and lives that have seen little light in contemporary books. Some stories were so compelling, they needed little embellishment before being woven into this tale.
Lindy Keane Carter is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. After writing non-fiction for 30 years, she signed up for a fiction-writing class at a community college in Maryland. Her short stories won awards in 2003 and 2009 in the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Fiction Project contest. The Rice Birds is her third published novel. Lindy is the mother of two daughters and a son. Visit her at www.facebook.com/LindyCarterAuthor or www.LindyCarter.com.
