THE GOODBYE SEASON

At the close of World War I, a Texas sharecropper’s daughter painfully learns about loss and suffering when the Spanish Influenza kills those she loves. Seventeen-year-old Mercy wonders how to “break free and make a life for herself without marrying some fool boy” and ending up saddled with four kids like her Mama. When she’s forced to work on another farm, Mercy gains strength from Mama’s advice to look for heart signs. Likewise, she copes with being the lone flu survivor of her family by heeding Mama’s exhortation to think about “the good that might be coming.” When she’s hired by the Wilder family and falls in love with the two young children and their older stepbrother, she’s determined not to end up like Mama—until she realizes she’s just like Mama and must follow her heart. Mercy tells her story in a gentle, cadenced voice filled with youthful hope, simple wisdom and gritty endurance. Perfect similes capture the flavor of Mercy’s bittersweet life during the epidemic of 1918. (Fiction. 12-18)