Her bond with Odell, her husband, is the book's great love story. Retta, the daughter of slaves, works for Annie and Edwin, wearing a crisp white maid's outfit in service to the very same plantation owners who once subjugated her family. Dalloway plopped down among the swamp gators. Their house, with its miraculous newly-installed telephone, is 'pure white and grand as the entrance to heaven.' A transplanted northerner, Annie customarily wears gloves and pearls, is registered to vote, and maintains an elegant demeanor in the middle of poverty-blasted surroundings Mrs. Three strong women struggle to make lives in this exhausted wasteland: Retta, Gertrude, and Annie are separated by the harsh realities of race and class, but make human connections despite the odds.īook Reviews Plutocracy, Not Theocracy Compels The Handmaids Of 'The Farm'Īnnie owns The Sewing Circle and, with her husband Edwin, nearly everything else in Branchville. By 1924, when Spera sets her story, it's a town of survivors, leftovers, and hangers on, most now trying to make a go of it with tobacco, one of the most unforgiving crops of all.

Branchville suffered a ruinous boll weevil blight that killed King Cotton and brought the whole region to its knees.

(As she informs us in her afterword, Spera spent portions of her girlhood in Branchville, using an outhouse and plucking chickens with her great grandmother, every-day experiences that worked to inspire her many years later.)Ĭall Your Daughter Home succeeds in painting an atmospheric portrait of the pre-Depression South, peopling the bleak, ravaged landscape with an almost dizzying array of characters. Deb Spera, a successful television producer, has deep roots in the very real town of Branchville, S.C., and draws on those roots in her first work of fiction, Call Your Daughter Home. Which one of us hasn't imagined putting down on paper a narrative of our ancestors? It's a go-to premise for almost all newbie novelists, who are naturally certain their own family histories will prove enthralling to others. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Call Your Daughter Home Author Deb Spera

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