Livin' in High Cotton

Small Press Bookwatch, Feb, 2005

Livin' In High Cotton

Jennifer Leigh Youngblood & Sandra Poole

Mapletree Publishing Company

6233 Harvard Lane, Highlands Ranch, CO 80130-3773

0972807144 $15.95 1-800-462-6420 www.mapletreepublishing.com

Livin' In High Cotton is the collaboration of Sandra Poole and her daughter Jennifer Leigh Youngblood. The story is set in the Depression-era south and inspired by the real-life experiences of Sandra's grandmother. Times were hard in western Georgia and eastern Alabama when the cotton industry was failing and families had to bind tightly together in order to survive those bleak and uncertain years. Shelby Collins was mature for a fifteen-year-old girl. When Shelby's mother had to go off to Alabama to tend Shelby's ailing grandmother, the girl had to care for her younger brother and sister, while seeing to the needs of her father. One night her father came home drunk and tried to attack her. When a frightened Shelby flees the home, her father tracks her down and places her in a reform school in distant Birmingham. Emotionally scarred by her abuse, Shelby is sill able to make a new life for herself and learns that blessings can come in the most unexpected ways. Strongly recommended and superbly crafted reading, Livin' In High Cotton successfully and engagingly tackles such difficult themes as whether or not trust can be regained after betrayal, how can being kind-hearted succeed in a world populate by evil people, and is there a power higher than ourselves that can come into our hearts to foster forgiveness and release us from the emotional bondage of a blighted past?