Stars of Alabama
In Depression-era Alabama, an abandoned baby is found in the woods by two itinerant workers. Failing to find the mother, they decide to raise the baby. They watch their family grow from the most unlikely roots as it increases again, when they meet a mother and two children in dire straits and take them under their wing.
A fifteen-year-old girl makes an error in judgement which alters her life’s trajectory irrevocably. Alone and starving, happenstance brings her to Cowikee’s railcar brothel, where she becomes maid and laundress, and it is here she discovers a precious talent and a new family in the friendship and love of the working girls.
A fourteen-year-old boy, raised since childhood as a revivalist preacher by his abusive father, escapes after stealing the revival collection plate and is helped toward manhood by several unlikely but faithful friends.
These three life stories intertwine, layer upon layer, gradually forming a whole. They weave like tributaries wending their way towards the river mouth, vividly described―complex with multiple characters, some of whom are quite unlikeable, but all of whom come alive on the page in Dietrich’s compelling prose. These are true survivors, eking out a desperate existence in dust-wracked Alabama, as a strong Revivalist movement is taking place. It is a tale of love and self-forgiveness―of friendship and loss and the power of relationships―of lonely people learning to love, as family, those who, but for the intervention of fate, were unknown to them just moments before.
Sean Dietrich, recognized for his commentary on life in the American South, is better known as a columnist and humorist than novelist. Stars of Alabama, although not his first novel, is the first to be picked up by a major publishing company. Highly recommended.
