"Charlotte's Story is a spell-binding account of how a young couple manage to carve out a life for themselves on an isolated Florida Key in the mid-1930s. To survive without electricity, running water, or any other modern conveniences, they fall back on the ways of the pioneer Conch settlers. With her ever-resourceful husband Russ' guidance, city-bred Charlotte learns to cope with sandflies, mosquitoes, and scorpions; masters sculling a boat and extracting a conch from its shell; and discovers the "beach store" is a treasure trove of needed household items. Their island home is visited by an assortment of characters so strange no novelist could imagine them. Rum runners, drug smugglers, and "borrowers" threaten their lives and make off with their possessions. Border patrolmen and Conch spongers befriend them, naive campers and ne'er-do-well yacht ladies provide comic relief, and an old black man tells them his secret recipe for yarb medicine, a forerunner of Viagra. Residents of the Keys and visitors alike will be glued to this book as they follow Charlotte and Russ through one hair-raising adventure after another culminating with their struggles to survive the terrible Labor Day hurricane of 1935." -- John Viele, authior of The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers.