B O O K
R E V I E W
SUSAN BECKHAM ZURENDA
THE GIRL FROM THE RED ROSE MOTEL R E V I E W E D BY P E T E R S C H M I T T
W
hen privileged, smartass senior Sterling Lovell and meek junior Hazel Smalls meet one day in in-school suspension at Ramsey High, they have no idea how their lives will change. Sterling, with several cronies, is there for disrupting his AP English teacher’s class. Hazel, “the girl from the Red Rose Motel,” is in ISS because she can’t afford to have her JROTC uniform dry cleaned. But the beautiful, alluring Zell catches Sterling’s eye and an unlikely love affair begins. That English instructor, the widowed, attractive, 50-something Angela Wilmore is also Zell’s teacher in a general level class. As she gradually learns more about Zell’s difficult home life — cleaning the motel rooms with her mother, supervising her little sister Chloe, her father a drunk, unemployed trucker — Angela finds herself caught up in the opposite-side-of-the-tracks romance between her students. Set in the author’s native South Carolina in 2012, this exemplary novel evolves from Susan Beckham Zurenda’s 33 years of teaching at a public high school and community college. Zurenda’s poetic, moving, multi-prizewinning debut Southern novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, 2020) set the bar very high — but no sophomore slump here. She has successfully expanded a published short story into a page-turner, alternating points of view by chapter among the three primaries — a narrative challenge she more than meets. Despite Zell’s best efforts at concealment, Sterling discovers that she lives at one of his slumlord father’s dingy properties, and his interest, and the complications, only deepen. Zurenda pulls the tattered curtain on the thousands of children and adolescents forced to reside today in tawdry motels because their families can’t afford security deposits on apartments or down payments on houses. Sterling’s snooty parents aren’t at all thrilled with their son’s new love, and his erstwhile girlfriend Courtney, a blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader prone to jealousy, is even less accepting. Zurenda draws on personal experience portraying the obstacles public school teachers face each day (with insufficient compensation). When Courtney’s father, a fundamentalist preacher, tries to intimidate Angela into dropping a Margaret Atwood story featuring a strong female character (and an occasional “f” word), she finds a welcome ally in her principal Finley Copeland. Tragedy strikes Hazel’s family, and Angela goes beyond the call in caring for her beleaguered, homeless student. To
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