What if it was the summer of 1965, you were fourteen, and all you could think of was money, food, and sex? What if every scheme you set up to become rich backfired? What if, at the height of your scheming, your father abandoned your family and your mother drank herself to death? What if during this one crazy summer you fell wildly in love with a girl?
JT, a budding entrepreneur, and his fifteen-year-old sister Lesi find themselves suddenly without parents and under the care of an aunt they love but who is, unbeknownst to them, gravely ill. On funeral day, when their mother’s mother, a bitter and stiff old woman they hardly know comes to take Lesi away, JT and Lesi fight successfully for her right to remain with their beloved aunt and with JT, not realizing that before the summer is over they will, again, be on their own and both back in the clutches of the one person they like the least.
From their tiny Mississippi hometown to the poet’s goat farm in the mountains of North Carolina, brother and sister begin a series of adventures, sometimes hilarious and other times frightening—and JT falls in love, but not before their lives take a dangerous and harrowing turn when brother and sister are attacked and seriously injured by an intruder when their aunt leaves them alone for a night to return to her job as a nurse.
On the journey to understanding their deceased mother and to finding the father who abandoned them, JT and Lesi discover much more—they find themselves and a new life in the process—and celebrate the miracle called the human spirit. |
