Reviews...

To read more about the books, click on their covers.

LIGHTNING IN JULY is a wonderfully human and illuminating novel set during the last epidemic of polio before the Salk vaccine became available.
The strength of this remarkable novel is in the unsentimental truth of McLaughlin’s handling of how Hally and Dan each learn to cope with impossible demands. What they end up discovering is that they do not have to give each other up. Rooted in harsh reality, their loves comes to flower. This reader found the novel moving and full of usable truth.
– May Sarton

THE BALANCING POLE treats a terrifying subject with wonderful lucidity...in a narrative of spare and compelling elegance.
– Jill Ker Conway
The Road from Coorain

SUNSET AT ROSALIE shimmers with the bittersweet magic of a young girl’s coming of age amidst the disintegration of her family’s traditional world. With exquisite delicacy, Ann McLaughlin interweaves the unfolding of Carlin’s imagination and the economic collapse of her father’s cotton plantation, and her words bring alive country life in Mississippi during the years before World War I.... A pleasure to read. SUNSET AT ROSALIE draws readers into the sights, textures, voices, and customs of a rural South precariously balanced between past and future. This is a novel that will linger in readers’ minds like a cherished memory.
– Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Within the Plantation Household

THE HOUSE ON Q STREET This moving and affecting novel.... tells the story of Joey, a young girl during World War ll-- told against the backdrop not only of war but also of her parents’ uncomfortable marriage. Her father’s work as a physicist in developing weapons of mass destruction resonates at this moment in history, bringing special relevance, insight, and heart to the lives of children in times of war. This is a lovely, intelligent book, with an engaging young girl at its center.
– Susan Shreve
Warm Springs
Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven

Maiden Voyage
If Nancy Drew were a young reporter instead of a sleuth, she’d be a dead ringer for Julia MacLean, with her stylish clothes, chic bobbed haircut and intrepid spirit of adventure. McLaughlin’s protagonist is a naive, 22-year-old Southerner who accepts a position as secretary to Sam Dawson, a retired newspaper mogul setting out on a year long trip on his yacht, the Sophia....

With opportunities to do so, Julia hones her writing by writing travel articles and taking pictures at the various ports of call...Her path keeps intersecting with that of a hunky young scientist, but romance and ambition prove difficult to juggle. On parallel maiden voyages, Julia and the Sophia both weather storms to emerge battered and worn, but triumphant. Inspired by her mother’s trip around the world with E.W. Scripps in 1924-25
and capturing the spirit of the times with her use of contemporary terms....
McLaughlin’s novel offers a pleasant diversion.
–Publishers Weekly

In Leaving Bayberry House, McLaughlin has rendered a story of such exquisite tension and tenderness that upon reaching the final page I felt I had experienced not so much a book as a gift. With ingenious skill, she takes us back and forth in time between the eras of Watergate and World War ll and between the interior lives of two estranged sisters who reunite to prepare the family home for sale. What unfolds in every room, in every delicate exchange, are revelations of love and betrayal, memories and secrets long embedded and, above all, the enduring bonds of family. McLaughlin reminds us of the power of fiction to tell us the truth about the quiet ways we hurt and heal and the human instinct for recovery and joy. A beautiful achievement, a gem of a novel.
–Martin Moran, The Tricky Part

“Nobody writes about fractured families more perceptively than Ann L. McLaughlin. Her sixth novel masterfully unfolds the story of two sisters haunted by the mistakes of their father, a flawed, charismatic minnister, decades after his death. Deeply imagined and deftly told, Leaving Baybery House is the work of an accomplished novelist writing at the height of her powers. It left me breathless.
–Kate Blackwell, you won’t remember this