CAME A GENTLE WHISPER

An orphaned girl finds a home in the Ozarks, then loses it to war and an epidemic in Cathey’s heart-wrenching coming-of-age novel.

Cora Lee McMillan is a 9-year-old orphan who comes to live with her grandmother Mae in a one-room cabin in Bennett’s Ridge, Missouri, in 1912. She takes to the poor but close-knit Ozarks community and makes many friends, including blithe, talkative, boy-crazy Alice Campbell; Ruby Douglas, the town rebel; and Ruby’s brother, Walter, a good-hearted lad eager to see the world who edges toward a romance with Cora Lee in adolescence. The fly in the ointment is Lucas McDaniel, a handsome, cruel boy whose bullying has a sinister sexual tinge. Cora Lee’s days are full of chores, prayer meetings, dances, and Mae’s reminiscences about the old days, but her world is disrupted in 1917 by America’s entry into World War I. Walter joins the army after Cora Lee promises to wait for him. Cora Lee follows Ruby to Little Rock, where they work as dance-hall girls selling dances, drinks, and conversation to lonely men—and sometimes more. (“Mavis makes plenty ‘cause she’s easy,” observes Ruby. “They give her extra tickets to let ‘em dance real close, if ya know what I mean.”) Country girl Cora Lee struggles to avoid being corrupted by the seamy, hard-edged city, but when Lucas tells her that Walter has taken up with another woman, she feels she has lost her past and maybe her soul. Cathey’s yarn steeps readers in a richly textured panorama of Ozarks culture and folkways. The author explores this world with a homespun lyricism, but also gives her characters a grit that she brings out in evocative, sinewy prose: “Ya just square yer shoulders, look ‘em right in the eye, and then spit,” Ruby explains on the subject of bullies. “Once ya see ya can take a punch or two and live, you’ll find out it ain’t so bad to be beat on.”

A beautifully written saga of love, loss, and belonging that turns trauma and grief into hard-won wisdom.