In 1910 Alabama, Violet Marie Glass collects secrets. One such secret carries the potential to destroy her family.
Violet Marie Glass has a hunger for adventure. She dreams of leaving her family’s farm one day for a life in any big city that will have her. As the teenager comes of age in 1910 Alabama, she collects secrets during her nightly traipsing with best friend Ruthie Sender. Most of her secrets are harmless experiences rooted in the girl’s own rebellion-she drinks liquor, dances to ragtime music, and mingles with a group of determined suffragettes. It’s during a visit with her oldest sister that Violet becomes aware of a long-kept family secret that carries the potential for ruin for the entire Glass clan. Life begins to unravel when a missing neighbor turns up dead. Violet suspects her grandfather may have had a hand in the man’s demise. Will the girl turn him in to the authorities, or will she add this secret to her growing collection? Violet soon discovers that a girl can keep only so many secrets before the weight of them becomes unbearable.
Excerpt
Violet hunched low, skirted the yard where those coloreds took up with their fire and song and whiskey. Friendly sorts, all of them. Always first with a kind word, an interest in Violet’s family, how the girl’s folks were getting on—even if that interest leaned toward pretend. But that’s the nature of the matter. It’s Violet’s great granddad who’d once owned all those souls that gave creation to the very ones now singing and drinking.
She broke through shadows collected beneath an ancient willow tree, found respite behind the Sender family’s privy, and waited for the girl to either show or not show.
Over near the fire, boys spoke of girls and things they’d do to this one or that—should agreement ever find mutual commonality. Nasty intentions, these notions under discussion, ideas conjured mostly in the male mind—though Violet, she’d configured a few of her own, those things that traipsed through her sleep.
But Violet, she’d never speak openly of such notions.
Except maybe to tell only Ruthie Sender.
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A novel about a family during World War II, set on the homefront in Springield, Mass., and in the South Pacific. The book focuses on four characters and how their lives were affected and changed during the war years.
