2007 Selection - On Agate Hill- Lee Smith

Join readers across Western North Carolina in reading and disucssing Lee Smith's latest novel. About the Author || About the Book || Schedule  || Related Links

Available for check out now at the Polk County Public Library and for purchase at The Book Shelf in Tryon. A 10% discount is offered to all TWR participants. Plan now to have your book group participate. Community programs will take place in September and October. It is also available for download and checkout through NetLibrary <http://www.netlibrary.com> (password required- ask at the Polk County Public Library how to get yours.

About the author:

Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing--and selling, for a nickel apiece--stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers." Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards.

Official Website: http://www.leesmith.com

About the Book:

Following her 2001 Southern Book Critics Circle award–winning novel, The Last Girls, Smith's 10th novel chronicles the post–Civil War life of a precocious Southern orphan using a slapdash patchwork of journal entries, letters, poems, recipes, songs, catechism and court records. Molly Petree, the daughter of a slain Confederate soldier, begins a diary on her 13th birthday in May 1872, near Hillsborough, N.C., at Agate Hill, the plantation of her legal guardian, Uncle Junius Hall. Seeing herself as "a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house," Molly falls under the spiteful devices of Selena, the scheming housekeeper, who marries a terminally ill Junius to inherit the plantation. Under Selena's watch, Molly is neglected, mistreated and raped before Simon Black, who fought alongside Molly's father, rescues her and enrolls her in the Gatewood Academy, where she becomes "an educated, fancy woman." After graduating, Molly marries sweet-talking Jacky, but tragedy dogs her: Jacky dies a particularly miserable death, their baby dies and when Molly returns to Agate Hill, she finds it in ruins. Molly's story is moving, —the narrative's pieces are the contents of "a box of old stuff" found during Agate Hill's renovation.

TOGETHER WE READ PROGRAM SCHEDULE
2007 FOOTHILLS EVENTS  

To Be Arranged

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Together We Read

Our mission is to develop in Western North Carolina a love of reading and heritage through the shared experience of well-chosen books.

About the Author || About the Book || Related Links