She has to dig deep to do what it takes to feed her daughters, to save them and make a life for them. With a drunk for a husband, they live in squalor and they are starving. Gertrude is a battered wife and mother of four young daughters. Three points of view skillfully depicted. Spera introduces us to three women, each an unforgettable character in their own way. This is rural South Carolina in 1924, devastated by boll weevils, hurricanes, the depressive economic time that the South experienced even before the Great Depression, but there are other struggles. I don’t use the word atmospheric very often, but it’s hard to not describe this book in that way. “It’s easier to kill a man than a gator, but it takes the same kind of wait.” What a fantastic line and what an amazing debut novel. Once in a while the opening sentence of a story is enough for me to know that I’ll be taken with it. Told in the pitch-perfect voices of Gertrude, Retta and Annie, Call Your Daughter Home is an audacious, timeless story about the power of family, deep-buried secrets and the ferocity of motherhood. Annie is the matriarch of the Coles family and must come to terms with the terrible truth that has ripped her family apart.These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to the terrible injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together. Retta is navigating a harsh world as a first-generation freed slave, still employed by the Coles, influential plantation proprietors who once owned her family. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters from starvation or die at the hands of an abusive husband. It's 1924 South Carolina and the region is still recovering from the infamous boll weevil infestation that devastated the land and the economy. A stunning tour de force following three fierce, unforgettable Southern women in the years leading up to the Great Depression

Call your daughter home by deb spera