This is a book that straddles the Fiction-Nonfiction border, called a true life novel about Lily Casey Smith. The author's last book was a memoir and this one is written about her grandmother's life, complete with pictures of herself, her mother, and her grandmother. But as is not her story, it is called fiction.
The New York Times felt this was one of the five best books of fiction published last yea, and while I think that is higher praise than I would heap upon it, the book is very good and it is also unusual.
Lily was born and grew up in the Southwestern United States in 1901. It is amazing how diverse the living conditions were amongst Americans just a hundred years ago. She was born in a dirt one-room house, hollowed out of a river bank (which naturally flooded and required new accomodations to be found). She had a toughness that was part inherited--her father had it in him--and partly created from her situation. Her parents did not value education for her, they did not support her either financially or emotionally, and anything she gained in her life she got by working twice as hard to get half as much.
I finished the book profoundly grateful to be living in an era where the lot of women has changed so substantially. It is a testimony to how hard it is to grow out of poverty when I think about where this woman's grand-daughter grew up--that the daughter she raised did a poorer job than she did, but not by much. i would love to see this on high school reading lists.
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