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In the first decades of the twentieth century, young Cora Lee emerges from Saint Anne's, an orphanage, to live with her Granny Mae in the Ozarks. In school, she makes friends—notably, a girl named Ruby who's widely despised by the other students for being "trash"—and foes. "Bad boy" Lucas McDaniel and his cronies, Robert and Jacob, make a sport of lifting the girls' skirts to see their undergarments. When the boys humiliate Cora Lee by pinning her to the ground, Cora Lee fears that they may have been attempting to kill her.
As she nears adulthood, Cora Lee pursues a flirtation with the unlettered but kindly Walter Douglas. On the night before he embarks for Europe to fight in the war, Walter kisses her passionately and asks her to wait for him. This Cora Lee agrees to do. That same night, tragedy strikes her homestead, and Cora Lee begins life on her own account. In the coming years, she'll encounter pandemics, speakeasies, and prohibition. Her path will intersect with Ruby's in unlikely ways, and her trust in Walter will be sorely tested.
The great virtue of this book is the vanished world it evokes. An impressive amount of research has gone into portraying the setting, and countless small details, such as Cora Lee receiving an apple and sweater each Christmas at the orphanage and a pair of candlesticks given to a newly married couple, accumulate to lend the story a sense of verisimilitude. The landscape of the Ozarks, with its bitter frosts and blue northers, is skillfully rendered. The colloquialisms mouthed by certain characters can be grating, but the psychology is persuasive and credible. Cora Lee's escalating misfortunes sustain interest till the very end. This is a fine work of historical fiction with a strong moral center.