Set in rural North Carolina between the Civil War and World War I, Love and Lament chronicles the Hartsoe family's ex­traordinary hardships and misfortunes.
Mary Bet, the youngest of nine children, was born the same year the first railroad arrived in their county. As she comes of age during the South's reconstruction and industrialization, she must learn to overcome her family's curse: the deaths of her mother and siblings, a deaf and damaged older brother, and her father's growing insanity and rejection of God.
In the rich tradition of Southern gothic literature, John Milliken Thompson transports the reader back in time through brilliant characterization and historical details to explore what it means to be a woman charting her own destiny in a rapidly evolving world dominated by men.
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“Thompson perfectly captures the Carolina Piedmont’s sights, sounds, and flavors and convincingly depicts the turn-of-the-century South—haunted by the Civil War, and embracing old-time religion and new-fangled machinery and ideas. Underlying and uplifting his narrative is Mary Bet’s vivid point of view: hiding while her grandmother breaks up her grandfather’s drunken poker game, helping the sheriff chase down moonshiners, watching Cicero and Able, the son of slaves, try to grow bananas in North Carolina’s climate.”
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Publishers Weekly