I could not put it down and yet I wanted to put it down because I didn't want to find out what happened to the characters. I knew it would end badly or sadly for them all and I just couldn't bear to know.
But I did finish it and it doesn't turn out well, but how can it in the 1940s in the South with the Ku Klux Klan? My heart ached for the characters. My heart ached for the difficulty of living in those times.
Hillary Jordan does an excellent job writing voice. In one interview she said she started out writing an essay about her grandmother for a Grad class she was taking. Then it turned into 50 pages, then she thought, "I have a novel."
Here is an excerpt from the author's interview on NPR -
"I started out writing what I thought was going to be a short story in the voice of Laura," Jordan says, "and as the story grew, I just found myself wanting to hear from other people. As the story got larger, as it embraced these other themes, these larger themes about war and about Jim Crow, I wanted to hear from those people."
You are drawn in very quickly to know these people. And the sacrifices they made, I'm just not sure we are made of the same material today.
You'll love it.
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