Dollar Daze: The Bottom Dollar Girls in Love
by Karin Gillespie (Simon & Schuster, $19.95)

"It was the night of the annual Sweetheart Dance in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, and the cinder-block walls of the high school gymnasium were festooned with foil hearts and crepe-paper cupids. Frank Sinatra crooned 'Fly Me to the Moon' on the oversized boom box while a crush of couples clung to each other on a makeshift dance floor beneath the basketball hoop.

Mavis Loomis, who was manning the punch bowl, clucked her tongue as she saw her friend Attalee Gaines seductively grinding her bony hips for the benefit of her white-haired date, Dooley Prichard.

'Someone needs to take a fire hose to those two,' whispered Birdie Murdock, who was selling baked goods next to Mavis.

Mavis shook her head in dismay. 'I'm surprised either of them have any spark left. Attalee's on the downhill slide of eighty, and Dooley can't be far behind.'

'Oh, he's a far younger man,' Birdie said with a snigger. 'Attalee was bragging about it the other day, saying she'd snagged herself a seventy-eight-year-old stud.'

'Leave it to Attalee,' Mavis chuckled.

'All that wooing and cooing,' Birdie said, waving a funeral home fan in front of her flushed face. 'I'm glad my dating days are done.' " --excerpted from the book