Fleming Community Library

Diane Chamberlain delivers a book about a small southern town fifty years ago, and the darkest - and most hopeful - places in the human heart After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm. As she struggles with her grandmother's aging, her sister's mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give. When Jane...

"It was four o'clock on the afternoon of December Twenty-fourth, 1841, in the village of Ballynockanor, County of Galway, Province of Connaught, Ireland. It was after mass on the first day of Advent that the old woman, Mad Molly Fahey, had told Father O'Bannon (as well as every farmer, farmer's wife, and child) that a great miracle was coming to visit the poor of Ballynockanor" -- Conatiner.

Inspired by the author's own childhood in rural Arkansas, this moving story follows one boy's journey from innocence to experience. Luke Chandler, 7, lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. During the harvest, he sees and hears things no child could possibly be prepared for and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever....

Based on reportage Agee did for Fortune magazine in 1936 covering three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, and Agee's subsequent piece entitled 'Let us now praise famous men,' this work is a rediscovered 30,000-word typescript, published for the first time and is one of the most relevant and honest depictions of poverty in America's South.