The Road to Bittersweet

December 15, 2017
The Stamper family is scattered when they are swept away in the catastrophic 1940 Tuckasegee River flood in the mountains of North Carolina. Fourteen-year-old narrator Wallis Ann, a scrappy girl who can work like a man, manages to survive on her own until everyone makes it back to Stampers Creek. But winter is coming, and their cabin and barn are gone, so as soon as Papa fixes the truck, they head south. Before the flood, the Stampers achieved some small fame as a musical act with Wallis Ann's older sister, Lacibeautiful, musically gifted, and autistic (an idiot savant, a doctor calls her)as the star. In the novel's second half, the Stampers are hired on as performers in a traveling carnival. As they work to scrape enough money together to go back home and rebuild, Wallis Ann has to contend with jealousy over the attention Laci draws. The two halves of the novel don't quite mesh, but Everhart (The Education of Dixie Dupree, 2016) is a good storyteller and makes her characters and their experiences come alive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)