Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s, and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother—more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children—and a violent father. In this riventing and heartrending memoir, Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.
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As children wage mock battles in the playground of Woodside Elementary School, two students, a little girl and boy, seem to vanish, last seen heading toward the woods behind the school. Hours pass and then only one of them, Adam, a nine-year-old boy with autism, is found alive, the sole witness to the girl’s murder. Barely verbal on the best of days, Adam has retreated into a silent world that Cara, his mother, knows only too well. With her community in shock and her son unable to help with the police investigation, Cara tries to decode the puzzling events.
When another child goes missing,
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Hick is the story of Luli McMullen—feisty, precocious, and out on her own at 13. Luli is running away from Nebraska to Las Vegas, where she plans to escape her disturbing present and even less hopeful future by finding herself a sugar daddy. That Luli finds trouble on the road almost immediately is no surprise. What is a surprise is that regardless of circumstances, Luli refuses to be a victim, even at her tender age. On her perilous journey west, she learns the truth of American rootlessness and discovers both the power and the peril of her own sexual curiosity.
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Young Tessa is diminutive, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Kansas community. When a mysterious, entrancing librarian comes to town, full of fabulous stories, earthy wisdom and potions for the lovelorn, she takes Tessa under her wing, teaching her to read, which opens up for Tessa a whole new world of possibility and hope. But even as she blooms, Tessa’s father begins sexually abusing her. And she learns that her mentor, Mary, carries a dark secret. Tessa runs off, following Mary’s footsteps, to join the circus as a trapeze artist,
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Devils in the Sugar Shop is the story of a group of women friends in Omaha who are struggling with various romantic troubles and who are all about to convene for a pre-Valentine’s Tupperware-like home party for “marital aids.” The evening, meant to be a lark, changes how they each view their lives and relationships—and not just their romances but also their friendships and relationships with their children. With his characteristic touch, Schaffert places an unusual cast in unusual circumstances and creates a comic tale that is similar to Tales of the City, or even a cross between “Sex and the City”
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