Milk Without Honey

by Lorene Hoover

Overview

A story about perseverance and the heedless cycle of poverty as a young Iowa farm girl witnesses the loss of her family's land and the potential disintegration of her family during the troubled years of the Great Depression.

Young Ruth Ann is bewildered when her parents lose their land and the bungalow she grew up in, sending her parents from one rented farmhouse to the next in hopes of finding a new home and work that sustains them. By the time Ruth Ann turns nine, her mother has had enough. Exhausted, plagued by rumors of her husband's infidelities, and in fear for her children's lives after a fatal accident, Sarah gathers her four children and moves to town where she opens a dilapidated boarding house in hopes of having some control over her future. The eccentric group of boarders who fill the house prove both entertaining and burdensome to Ruth Ann, but it's the country's deepening economic crisis that makes the risky situation impossible. Unable to sustain the house and feed her children, Sarah faces a difficult choice: to bury her pride and go back to her husband or to keep trying with no relief in sight. Ruth Ann is ecstatic at the possibility of returning to her old way of life, but another tragedy demonstrates that fortunes are precarious and the only thing a person can do is count one's blessings and try to rebuild.

Brimming with the realities of living on the brink as well as hope and humor, Milk Without Honey is a riveting portrait of a time and place, and an unforgettable reading experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578828664
Publisher:	Michelle Hoover
Publication date:	01/26/2021
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Lorene Hoover is a fiction writer, essayist, playwright, and poet. Her work has appeared in THEMA Literary Journal, Rosebud Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Des Moines Register, and in the anthology Grandparents Cry Twice: Help for Bereaved Grandparents, among other publications. She grew up near Centerville, Iowa, and currently lives in Ames and winters in Fountain Hills, Arizona. She enjoys book groups, leisurely walks, ice cream, a working television, a good view out her window, and music. Milk Without Honey is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

"In Milk Without Honey, Hoover's young storyteller opens a secret door to Iowa during the Great Depression. I love this book and will recommend it with the same proselytizing vigor I previously reserved for my all-time favorite: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." _-Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage

"Calls to mind the best qualities in Charles Dickens and Willa Cather. I recommend reading it aloud to family members, young and old, who are ready to be brought under the rare spell of a master oral storyteller." --Kevin McIlvoy, author of At the Gate of All Wonder

"Moving, poignant, and absorbing, this portrait of Iowan family during the Great Depression is exactly what the world needs right now-for though there is struggle and loss, there is humanity, humor, and such heart." -Maya Shanbhag Lang, author of What We Carry and The Sixteenth of June

"Lorene Hoover's child narrator is reminiscent of Harper Lee's Scout Finch: unafraid, always watching, and understanding more than grown-ups think she does. Hoover is a keen storyteller who recreates dustbowl Iowa in deft strokes. Milk Without Honey is an evocative page-turner." -Kate Southwood, author of Falling to Earth and Evensong

"Hoover captures a season in the life of an American family that may be unrecognizable. Yet for me, an immigrant of color, Ruth Ann's love for family and her journey to the other side of a difficult period in her life is universal." -Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers

"This heartfelt portrait of the weight of love, the ravages of the Great Depression, and the peculiar loneliness of childhood had me at every moment. I'll be thinking about this family for a long time." -Gregory Brown, author of The Lowering Days

"An intimate portrait of Great Depression Iowa and a novel of poignant contrasts, Hoover's Milk Without Honey meticulously evokes Iowa on the cusp of World War II and the endurance of people caught between eras." -Deni Béchard, author of A Song from Faraway

"Milk Without Honey is a searing portrait of hardscrabble farm life. Tensions crackle beneath a surface calm, neighbors bristle with old resentments, a family is fractured and reformed. It is a story not of triumph but, ultimately, of hope." -Patricia Horvath, author of All the Difference: A Memoir

From the Publisher