From the author of The Whisper of the River and Epiphany.

In this coming-of-age story, Porter Osbourne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the Depression. On a red-clay farm in Georgia, he learns all there is to know about cotton-chopping, hog-killing, watermelon-thumping, and mule-handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex. But it is Porter's family-- his genteel, patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother, and,...

Alice Reese knows that the cheerful sounds of her family eating breakfast mask a ten-year marriage falling apart. As Alice and her husband, Will, struggle to understand -- and perhaps recapture -- the feelings that drew them together in the first place, their interior lives are sensitively and convincingly explored.