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By WHITNEY CORK Staff Writer

Welcome to Mullaby, a small North Carolina town that boasts the Southeast's largest barbecue festival, a gentle, 8-foot giant and mysterious ghost lights. Unaware of any of this, Emily Benedict arrives in town after her mother's death and moves in with her grandfather. In Sarah Addison Allen's novel, "The Girl Who Chased the Moon," Emily will be the catalyst for helping residents resolve some 20 years of lies and misunderstandings.

You may remember Allen, a native of Asheville, from her best-selling debut "Garden Spells," which made The New York Times best-seller list. With three books to her credit, including "The Sugar Queen," she's building a collection of novels about small towns with the whimsy and sweetness that Southern fiction sometimes lacks.

Her book is filled with delicious foods -- Lexington barbecue, fried pickles and cakes of all kinds -- and interesting smells, from the town's air -- "tomato-sweet and hickory-smoked, all at once delicious and strange" -- to a baker's kitchen -- "the smell of hope, the kind of smell that brought people home."

Allen also includes a spoonful (or two) of magic -- black dust that reveals a cheating husband, a frog sent by a long-ago love, wallpaper that changes to match your mood -- and other childlike fantasies that most of us sadly lose to adultlike common sense.

"The Girl Who Chased the Moon" is in many ways about two girls -- teenager Emily Benedict and thirtysomething Julia Winterson. "I just don't know where home is. There's this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes," Julia says. "But it's like chasing the moon -- just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon."

Emily, the only child of an over-achieving social activist, is orphaned by a car accident and sent to live with the grandfather she's just learned exists. On her first morning in town, she meets Win Coffey, the teenage son of a prominent family that blames her mother for something awful. Since no one wants to tell her exactly what happened, Emily sets out to learn what made her mother leave Mullaby, never to speak of the town and its people again.

Julia returns after her father's death to sell his barbecue restaurant so she can open a bakery in Baltimore. But returning to the town she left as an angry 16-year-old opens doors for her that she thought were long closed. Will she stick to her two-year plan to stay just long enough to pay off the mortgage on J's Barbecue or will she find her home in Mullaby after all?

By giving us two heroines, Allen makes this book appealing to teens and adults. She makes it easy for all women to see themselves in her charming characters and the magical town of Mullaby. My only regret is that our visit was too short at fewer than 300 pages.

"The Girl Who Chased the Moon" makes for an excellent bedtime story, full of the language of make-believe and the secret wish that something wondrous (or maybe dreadful) will happen. But just as with a bedtime story, we're safe in the knowledge that the heroines will choose to stick it out and find love and forgiveness along the way.

Sarah Addison Allen clearly knows that all the fun is in the journey. I suggest you sit back, open this book and join her.

Contact Whitney Cork at 373-7007 or whitney.cork@news-record.com