Username or e-mail: *

Password: *

• Join the Community
• Forgot Your Password?

In 1931 Carbon Hill, a small Alabama coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches a woman shove the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word. For the Moore family, focused on helping anyone in need during the Great Depression, the apparent murder forces them to face the darker side of their community and question the motivations of family and friends. Backbreaking work keeps most of the townspeople busy from dawn to dusk, and racial tensions abound. For parents, it's a time when a better life for the children means sacrificing health, time, and every penny that can be saved. For a miner, returning home after work is a possibility, not a certainty. However, next to daily thoughts of death, exhausting work, and race are the lingering pleasures of sweet tea, feather beds, and lightning bugs yet to be caught.

2. Why doesn't Sheriff Taylor inform the Moores that the baby was already dead as soon as he receives the inquest results?

3. If the woman and the baby had been black, do you feel that the investigation would have proceeded differently?

4. When Virgie and Tess check on Lola Lowe's new baby, Lola immediately knows why they are there, and their schoolmate Ellen is clearly embarrassed to have them see her home. Did their attempts to solve the mystery do more harm than good? How pure were their motives?

5. After the stock market crash, Jesse Bridgeman, the banker, kills himself. Why do you think a person who—even after losing most of his money—still had more than most of the townspeople would commit suicide?

6. "Beans and onion. Squash and tomato. It was the different tastes together, the ones that it didn't make no sense at all to stick on the same form, that your tongue really remembered" (p. 146). Are there any other examples in the novel when Phillips uses food as a metaphor? What do these metaphors tell us about the world she creates?

7. Would Tess and Jack have learned the lesson their father hoped to impart by taking them to pick cotton if they hadn't encountered and become friends with the Talbert children?

8. Why doesn't Albert sue the brick company after their truck driver hits Jack? Such a decision would be unfathomable today. What do you think has changed about our society? Is the change for better or worse?

9. What do you think about Jonah's explanation of why he won't have dinner at the Moores? Would you, like Albert, have capitulated? How did Jack's accident affect Albert's position

10. Jonah and Albert feel they can never be real friends because of their race. Have you ever had to disavow or stifle a friendship because of external social pressures?

11. Albert chooses to protect his family over fully expressing his friendship for Jonah. Do you think he made the right choice? What other choices do the characters in the book make that can be read as both good and bad?

12. Did Virgie and Tess do the right thing in keeping the Well Woman's identity a secret? How might their lives have turned out differently if she hadn't chosen their well?

• April 2012 Indie Next List
• March 2012 Indie Next List
• February 2012 Indie Next List