Some Luck by Jame Smiley

Jane Smiley’s newest novel is the first in The Last Hundred Years trilogy.  The Pulitzer prize winning author intends to cover 100 years in the life of an Iowa farm family and the first novel, Some Luck, covers the years 1920-1953.  Smiley follows the Langdon family of Denby, Iowa through childbirth, death, the Great Depression and World War II in a unique fashion.  Not only does the author write from many of the different characters points of view, but each chapter itself represents one year. 

We begin with Walter, the 25 year-old father and owner of the farm.  His wife Rosanna is about to give birth to their first child, Frank, and he is ruminating on all of the things that farmers think about: which crops to plant this year, how many animals are there to take care of and can I really afford to farm all of this land? As the years move forward, Smiley introduces us to all of the Langdon children: Frank, Joe, Mary Elizabeth, Lillian, Henry and Claire and their unique personalities.  We see Walter struggle with changing technologies (horses vs. tractors) and Rosanna has her own challenges with loss and religion. 

Each of the Langdon children is different than the last, and we hear a lot from the point of view of Frank, the handsomest and, arguably, the most cunning Langdon child.  When the US gets involved in World War II, he joins the army and becomes a sniper while his sensitive younger brother Joe stays home on a II-A deferment and takes care of the family farm.  Lillian falls in love with a handsome stranger and Henry devours books as fast as he can get his hands on them.  The reader is quickly absorbed into the world that Smiley creates and is soon laughing and crying along with the family. 

Some Luck has been shortlisted for the National Book Award and is a profound family saga.

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

In 1929, a dance hall in a small Missouri town exploded, killing forty-two people.  One of them was pretty Ruby DeGeer, who, although poor and poorly educated, easily attracted the attention of wealthy men.  One of these men was banker Arthur Glencross, who employed Ruby’s older sister, Alma Dunahew, as his maid. Alma had good reason to believe that Glencross was responsible for the explosion and made herself few friends in town by saying so. Although there were others who could be suspected, Alma was unyielding in her certainty of his guilt.  Her fight for justice eventually turned into what was considered bizarre behavior.  Finally, practically catatonic, she was committed to the Work Farm. Her disappearance into her own misery left her youngest son, John Paul, motherless at an age when he still needed his mother. Dependent on odd jobs and the kindness of neighbors for most of his childhood and youth, John Paul resented his mother’s obsession and the loss of his family. The rift these hard times created between mother and son lasted into John Paul’s adulthood and Alma’s old age. In The Maid's Version, Alma tells her story to her grandson with hope of healing the rift. Author Daniel Woodrell is a well-respected author whose last book, Winter's Bone was made into a successful movie. In this book he draws a vivid picture of small town life in depression-era Middle America, clearly depicting the great divide between rich and poor, weak and powerful. 

Check out The Maid's Version @ the library! (Check out the new version of County Cat too!)

Mary Coin by Marisa Silver

Mary Coin is the story of two women struggling during the Great Depression. Photographer Vera Dare, who began her career taking formal photographs of the society women of San Francisco, left her children in the care of another family and traveled into the rural parts of California, photographing migrant farm workers. Mary Coin was one of these migrants, a widow with six children who traveled from one California farm to another, working for any employer who would hire a woman for his picking crews. When their paths crossed, Mary was at her lowest point. A freeze had killed the crops she hoped to pick. Her car had broken down and money was scarce. She and her children were dirty, hungry and exhausted, living in a tent. The Great Depression and her husband’s death had taken her from poverty to destitution, from a family who never had anything to a family who had nothing.  Vera took several photographs of Mary and her children. One of these pictures became an iconic symbol of the era. Although Vera became famous, Mary remained anonymous and neither woman profited financially. People and families are shaped in part by their experiences, and in later, more prosperous years, Mary’s children were close and protective of her while Vera’s became distant and cool.  More than seventy years later, Walker Dodge, a college professor, has come to suspect that his family has a connection to the famous photograph. He investigates the evidence, but too much time has passed and he is never able to ferret out the truth.
  

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

After a horrific scandal tears her family apart, sheltered, headstrong, fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell is banished from her beloved childhood home on a citrus farm in Florida to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, isolated deep in the North Carolina mountains.  Forced to leave behind her twin brother, Sam, her older cousin Georgie, and, perhaps worst of all, her beloved pony, Sasi, Thea is exiled from everyone and everything she has ever known.

With the Great Depression just beginning, Thea and the other girls at camp, all the daughters of wealthy Southern men, are sheltered from the worst of the storm tearing apart the rest of the nation.  Although Thea hates that she has been sent away from Sam, Georgie, Sasi, and the Florida heat, the mountains of North Carolina are spectacular, she is surrounded by horses, for the first time is receiving formal equestrian instruction, and is discovering how to makes friends with girls her own age.  Although her arrival so late in the summer means gossip about trouble with a boy at home is rampant among the Yonahlossee girls, the real reason behind Thea's late enrollment is known only by the headmaster, Henry Holmes, and his wife Beth, an old boarding school friend of Thea's mother.  Free to start fresh, Thea must decide if she can forgive herself for what happened - and her family for refusing to forgive her - and become a new, different girl, or if she will allow her desires for the things she cannot have to once again consume her.

This suspenseful family drama slowly reveals its secrets against the spectacular scenery of the Appalachian mountains and the late summer heat of Florida.  Beautifully written, anyone who loves period drama, Southern fiction, or can't resist a boarding school coming-of-age story (really, who can? And this one has horses!) should put The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls on their summer reading list!

The Yonahlassee Riding Camp for Girls will be published on June 4, 2013.  The library received its advance reading copy from the publisher.  Check CountyCat in late spring to place a hold on this Southern novel!