After teaching high school and elementary school for decades, a teacher learns a lot about students, their disparate lives, their travails and turmoil. That’s also where Susan Beckham Zurenda, an English teacher for 33 years at Spartanburg High, draws her inspiration—and some material—for her just-released novel, The Girl from the Red Rose Motel.
“Set in a fictitious Southern town in 2012, the novel is told from the points of view of protagonist Hazel Smalls, a bright but disadvantaged junior living with her family in a rundown motel; Sterling Lovell, a brilliant and advantaged high school senior; and Angela Wilmore, a stern but compassionate English teacher confronting the multifaceted challenges high school teachers face in and out of the classroom each day,” she says, laying out the story in an email before a lively conversation about her product and process.
Sterling, she says, is an amalgam of eight former students, arrogant, affluent hooligans—her word—whose influential parents provide cover. Hazel? “She never existed in real life,” Zurenda says.
The novel throws these two together in an in-school suspension, where a forbidden romance—and more—takes root. Along the way, Angela, the schoolteacher Zurenda says isn’t remotely like her, serves as something of a guide.
Sterling was the first character to emerge in her imagination, she notes. He had grown up overweight, with “Dumbo ears,” the target of considerable bullying and some humiliation at the hands of his parents. In high school, he morphs into the cool kid with the beautiful blonde girlfriend.
“And as I thought about him, and I thought about how he believed he had the world by the tail—and he does in a certain aspect—I wondered if I could bring out the empathy in a kid like that,” she says.
Enter Hazel, who lives with her mother, impoverished, lonely, and all but homeless, at the Red Rose Motel. The teens’ lives collide in Ramsey High School’s in-school suspension room, modeled after Spartanburg High’s senior study room, she says. There, Sterling connects his adolescent shame, at some level, to the shame Hazel deals with every day, Zurenda explains.
“I wanted to see if I could work on a plot and circumstances and feelings and personalities that would make Sterling become more compassionate and even empathetic, kind of proving he always had that ability, but he’d never really used it or needed to use it until he met Hazel,” she says.
While The Girl from the Red Rose Motel isn’t a coming-of-age story, her first novel, Bells for Eli, (Mercer University Press, 2021) offers a Bildungsroman tale also about forbidden love. Cassandra King Conway, the writer and widow of the iconic Southern author Pat Conroy, calls Zurenda’s debut “a tender, beautifully rendered novel.”
Her sophomore effort won similar acclaim.
“Zurenda’s characters are complex, and their story is deeply moving without veering into sentimentality. Bravo!” writes Ron Rash, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author from North Carolina.
“What I hope readers take away from it, or something I hope they take away from it, is that sometimes our intense differences ironically help us to come together and benefit each other.”
The Girl from the Red Rose Motel
Mercer University Press
Published: Sept. 5, 2023
Hardcover, 291 pages, $27
Also available on Kindle: $20
