Review: Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

Catherine Grace Cline was six years old, and her sister Martha Ann was four, when their mother drowned.  Their daddy is the preacher at the Baptist church in their small Georgia town.  When their father is busy, Gloria Jean, a neighbor and old friend of their mother’s watches the girls.  Catherine Grace loves Gloria Jean because she’s the only person who will talk about her mother.

Catherine Grace and Martha Ann head down to the Dairy Queen every Saturday for a Dilly Bar.  That’s when Catherine Grace does her dreaming and planning.  She longs to get out of their small town and head to Atlanta and can’t understand why Eddie Franklin is content with his life – working at Dairy Queen in a small town.

When Catherine Grace causes a commotion at a church function, her father punishes her by forbidding her to go to Dairy Queen for the rest of the summer.  Gloria Jean comes up with a plan to keep the girls busy and help Catherine Grace earn money for her get-away all at the same time.

After she graduates from high school and turns eighteen, Catherine Grace heads to Atlanta with her savings.  She finds a job and a place to live and things are going pretty well for her when she’s called home because of a family emergency.  She gets some shocking news when she gets home and finds out that she may have been looking for happiness in the wrong place all along.

Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen is the wonderful debut novel of Susan Gregg Gilmore.   (It’s hard for me to believe this is her first book!)  There is so much more to this book than appears on the surface.   It’s about love and acceptance of friends and family.  It’s about having a dream and having the guts to follow it.  Mostly it’s about forgiveness, though.

This book is full of fantastic characters, too.  I just loved Catherine Grace and could relate to her restless, curious spirit.  She misses her mother so much and feels guilty because she doesn’t remember her as well as she thinks she should.  She also feels some pressure to be perfect since she’s the preacher’s daughter.  Gloria Jean was a wonderful, loving character who was just a little bit different.  She provided so much for the girls including a strong female role model.  A lot of the secondary characters were great too.  I was really able to get a feel for the small Georgia town they all lived in.

I’ll readily admit that I’m partial to books set in the South, but I would have loved Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen no matter where it had been set.  I can’t wait for Susan Gregg Gilmore’s next novel.