It\u2019s August 2005 in Hartless, a small, dusty town in the Texas Panhandle. Kindergarten teacher Helen McCabe, in her mid-50s, has just finished the first week of school, hoping that her class will help her find her mooring again. Her husband, Hal, recently died in a car crash; he drove into an intersection, just as a trailer truck was entering from the cross lane, and Helen thinks it might have been suicide. She vows that she\u2019ll \u201cnever miss the signs of someone in trouble again.\u201d Jillie Simpson, a 5-year-old girl in her class, has captured her attention: \u201cOne tiny, quiet girl, with huge brown eyes equally bright and sad, mirrored Helen\u2019s grief.\u201d But Helen\u2019s pain is about more than the loss of her spouse; it\u2019s also related to losing her baby daughter, who died many years ago. Jillie\u2019s 23-year-old mother, Charlene Simpson, lives with Jillie\u2019s father, Ray Hopper, and Ray\u2019s teenage son, Mick, in another part of town. They eke out a hardscrabble life, with Charlene working at a secondhand shop. When Ray learns that Charlene is pregnant again, he beats her and takes off, leaving Mick and Jillie behind, as well as months of unpaid bills. Helen, who\u2019s weighed down by her own troubles, becomes preoccupied with anxiety about Jillie, and she becomes determined to protect the child, without fully understanding the danger that surrounds Charlene. Over the course of this novel, Alexander\u2019s prose convincingly captures the atmosphere and dialect of a small Panhandle town, where everyone knows everyone else and gossip spreads with the speed of the dry wind, with brutal judgment always quick to follow. She delivers a poignant tale of people dealing with grief, guilt, secrets, and transformations, as well as unexpected relationships. The sibling relationship between Jillie and her half brother, Mick, is the most tender, and when tragedy strikes, Charlene and Mick both face some of the hardest times of their lives.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s August 2005 in Hartless, a small, dusty town in the Texas Panhandle. Kindergarten teacher Helen McCabe, in her mid-50s, has just finished the first week of school, hoping that her class will help her find her mooring again. Her husband, Hal, recently died in a car crash; he drove into an intersection, just as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}