A Willful Child A story of Betrayals and Beginnings Janet Steele
Holloway's debut is as dazzling as the West Virginia countryside
she describes. Her father a hardworking coalminer, her granny an
unrepentant bootlegger, Holloway remembers a childhood grasping at
the shards of a shattering family. She emerges as a young woman
ready for anything. This memoir is poignant, brutal, funny,
inspired. Neil Chethik, author of FatherLoss Painful, warm and
wise, Janet Steele Holloway's debut memoir, A Willful Child,
vividly portrays a remarkable yet ordinary family whose life is
more typical of post-war America than we'd like to think. At the
mercy of an unstable, beautiful mother and a coal miner father in
the boom-and-bust mountain economy, Holloway's childhood is spent
on the move from coal camp, to her granny's beer garden, to a farm
in southwest Virginia, to both coasts of Florida, and back to the
mountains. Billie Brown, her pragmatic bootlegging granny, supplies
rootedness, but cannot assuage her own daughter's restless
discontent or shore up the headstrong streak that will become her
granddaughter's greatest strength. A Willful Child shows us how a
girl-becoming-a-woman gathers courage, confidence, and wisdom to
weave a self from the pieces and places of a fragmented life.
Leatha Kendrick, author of Second Opinion This gripping story
speaks for many Appalachian women and children who broke away from
mountain culture to live a life of promise and success and never
forgot their mountain heritage. Janet Holloway tells an engaging
story of a bright child caught in the ruins of her parents'
marriage and her determination to create a productive, creative
life for herself. Jane Stephenson, founder of New Opportunity
School for Women; Author, Courageous Paths: Stories of Nine
Appalachian Women
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