The Forgiving Kind was released by Kensington on January 29, 2019. Immediately, I was drawn to the story because I grew up with a similar hard-scrapple cotton farming family in Texas and picked cotton with my cousins and migrant farm workers.
Author Donna Everhart really understands and is able to depict that life where neighbors shared telephones on “party lines” and outhouses still existed. I was immediately transported back to the South in the 1950s—an era I grew up in. I remember separate drinking fountains and toilets for “colored” people, though my family, like the Creeches in The Forgiving Kind didn’t pay much attention to those artitrary social lines.
The Forgiving Kind captures the hardships and pleasures of being a cotton-farming family: the terror of bole weevils or drought or rain at the wrong time of cotton development. It is a coming-of-age story blended with a searing family drama. When their father dies after being bitten by a rattlesnake, the Creeches (Sonny, her mother, and two brothers learn that they have little money to subsist on—not enough to plant the year’s crop of cotton. Faced with the potential loss of their farm, they accept help from the rich man, Frank Fowler, who lives on the farm next door. Eventually, Fowler seduces and marries the mother—which leads to unforeseen devastating consequences.
The richness of farm life and Sonny’s attachment to the land is exquisitely portrayed. I read this in one night and was sorry to see the book end.
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