Reviewer: Lori Graham
Title: The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell
Author: Loraine Despres
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-051526-0
Release Date: Paperback Edition June 2006
Genre/Sub-genre: Historical Fiction (Some Romance)
Year/Setting: In the years following the Great War/LA
Overall Rating: 4.5
Sexual Content Rating: Mildly Sexual
Language (Profanity) Content Rating: None
Violent Content Rating: Mild
Loraine's Website:
www.lorainedespres.com
Belle Cantrell tries to live the life expected from a "good" southern woman but she finds that no matter how many times she chants the "rules" in her head, she just can’t stop herself from bending a few of them. It starts as she gets ready for her husband to return from war. He has never seen her in fancy red underwear so now he shall. Of course, they are constantly interrupted during the day he arrives home. That evening they fight over something not all that important. She goes home to wait for him and he goes to play poker. That was the last time they spent together as he died at that poker game.
Belle doesn’t quite know what to do with herself at this point. She has waited so long for him to come home from war and built her life around that waiting. Now she has a daughter to finish raising and nothing on the horizon. She has been living with her mother-in-law during the wait; Miss Effie wants her to stay and help run the plantation.
Belle feels she can accomplish this with Luther’s help (the foreman of sorts). However, that hope is soon dashed when his family is run off (Luther is black and there is quite a bit of racial uprising happening). Miss Effie hires Bourree as the new foreman but Belle doesn’t trust him as far as she can throw him. She lets Bourree take over the actual farming but she keeps the books.
The only problem with this is Belle can’t add all that well. She seeks help from her best friends in town, Abe and Rachael Rubenstein. Rachael’s brother, Rafe Berlin, is in town helping after Abe had a heart attack. Belle finds herself feeling things for him that are thrilling and yet totally not in the "rules."
Racial tensions continue to escalate in Gentry as the KKK moves in and women continue to seek the vote. All in all it seems like more than Belle and her family, let alone the community, can handle.
Loraine Despres has hit on many hot topics with The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell. Everything from the KKK’s start to the bobbing of women’s hair. Belle Cantrell is a woman ahead of her time as she understands time has to move forward. She could have curled up in a chair and pitied herself to death after the death of her husband but she chose to move forward. It would have been one thing for him to die on the battlefield but he actually died just a few miles down the road from home (and she isn’t even sure it was an accidental death). Belle is smart, witty, and determined. The courage she shows time and again as she faces the "rules" placed on "good" women, the opinion of neighbors, learning new skills such as bookkeeping and even facing up to men with guns – all in the name of standing up for what she believes in. Her fortitude is the center of this story. While all of the characters surrounding her are wonderfully written in their own right, Belle is the "belle of the ball" and tells of the role many women played in the history of this country. No, she didn’t do everything perfectly but she certainly tried. 
Lori
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