From an award-winning author comes a wise and tender coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on a life-changing roadtrip.
"Whistling past the graveyard." That s what Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most worstest fear. . . .
In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother s Mississippi home. Starla s destination is Nashville, where her mother went to become a famous singer, abandoning Starla when she was three. Walking a lonely country road, Starla accepts a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. Now, on the road trip that will change her life forever, Starla sees for the first time life as it really is as she reaches for a dream of how it could one day be."