Gillespie, Karin

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Gillespie, Karin

PERSONAL:

Married David Neches (a musician), May, 2005; children: Brandon.

CAREER:

Writer. Girlfriends' Cyber Circuit, founder. Previously worked as a special education teacher at an inner-city school and editor of a regional parenting magazine.

WRITINGS:

(With Jill Conner Browne) The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel: Stuff We Didn't Actually Do, but Could Have, and May Yet, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2007.

"BOTTOM DOLLAR GIRLS" NOVEL SERIES

Bet Your Bottom Dollar, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2004.

A Dollar Short, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2005.

Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2006.

Also bimonthly columnist for the Augusta Chronicle.

ADAPTATIONS:

Author's books have been adapted for audio, including, Bet Your Bottom Dollar, Blackstone, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Karin Gillespie is the author of the "Bottom Dollar" series of novels featuring three women in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, working at the Bottom Dollar Emporium: Mavis (the store's owner), Elizabeth, and Attalee. In the first book in the series, Bet Your Bottom Dollar, the three friends and coworkers are concerned about keeping the Bottom Dollar Emporium in business after hearing that a Super Saver Dollar Store will be built in town. In the meantime, Halloween is near, the store is busy, and Elizabeth meets and falls for Timothy Hollingworth, a local who has become a Buddhist and walks around in what most of the locals consider to be a sheet. "A winner of a first novel, filled with southern-style zingers and funny folks," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Jennifer Baker, writing in Booklist, noted that the reader should "brace for a wild ride chock-full of southern wit and down-home advice."

A Dollar Short finds the three friends and coworkers of the Bottom Dollar Emporium trying to set right the love lives of several neighbors while saving the local senior center, which is about to go out of business. Their plan for the center is to raise money with a nude calendar featuring who else but the Bottom Dollar women. Writing in Booklist, Jennifer Baker commented that readers "will welcome this raucous southern spoof," adding that there is "never a dull moment." A Publishers Weekly contributor noted the author's "down-home humor."

The octogenarian Attalee is about to get married in Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love. In the meantime, Mavis, who is in her sixties, is seeing her old high school boyfriend, an ex-jock named Brewster Clark who is secretly seeing Mavis's best friend, Birdie Murdock. As for Elizabeth, her man wants her to quit working at the Bottom Dollar Emporium so she can be a typical homemaker taking care of children and the home. "Each character is lovingly crafted," noted Shelley Mosley in Booklist. Mosley went on to call the novel "hilarious, heartwarming, and often irreverent." A Kirkus Reviews contributor referred to Dollar Daze as a "sweet and amusing tale of romance and lust for the older crowd."

Gillespie teams with Jill Conner Browne for The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel: Stuff We Didn't Actually Do, but Could Have, and May Yet. The novel features five high school friends from Jackson, Mississippi: Jill, Mary Bennett, Patsy, Tammy, and Gerald. They called themselves the Sweet Potato Queens when they were young and in high school, and ever since then their primary goal is to have fun whenever they are together. Two decades later, the friends have led wildly divergent lives but remain in close contact: Mary is a soap-opera star, Tammy is a television weather girl, Patsy is a stay-at-home mom, and Jill has a dull job and life before deciding to become a personal trainer. The novel culminates in Tammy's three friends flying off to London to save her from a bad romantic decision. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the novel "hilarious and heart-warming."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2004, Jennifer Baker, review of Bet Your Bottom Dollar, p. 1700; July, 2005, Jennifer Baker, review of A Dollar Short, p. 1898; July 1, 2006, Shelley Mosley, review of Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love, p. 41.

Business and Company ASAP, May 15, 2006, review of Dollar Daze, p. 45; October 2, 2006, review of The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel: Stuff We Didn't Actually Do, but Could Have, and May Yet, p. 39.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2004, review of Bet Your Bottom Dollar, p. 458; May 15, 2006, review of Dollar Daze, p. 484; November 15, 2006, review of review of The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel, p. 1142.

Publishers Weekly, June 20, 2005, review of A Dollar Short, p. 55.