Miss Sally

This is the vivid portrait of a young girl's deeply moving initiation into womanhood: the discovery of sex without hope of love, and grief without the release of tears. The setting is rural Texas in the 1930s, a rough and tumble environment in which the thirteen-year-old Sally Halm questions but tries to appease her authoritarian mother's religiosity, appeasement that leads to misguided attempts to seek a salvation that her environment ruptures Following the tradition of realistic sexual coming of age novels like those of John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell, Miss Sally struggles to reconcile the concepts of "sin" and "salvation" that seem to dominate her life as she ricochets between hope and rejection. Inspired by the testimony of a woman evangelist who recounted rising from degradation to achieve happiness and prosperity thanks to accepting Jesus as her personal savior Sally tries to emulate her but realizes "everything I do I do backwards, I can't even sin without people laughing at me." Sent to live with relatives in another part of central Texas, Sally becomes infatuated with an older cousin whom she helps to milk cows and to breed a mare. Though supportive he's a man who seems to hate himself, a hard drinker who has no use for religion and prefers the company of prostitutes than that of "churchy people." Again Sally does things backwards and alienates him as she's alienated others. Her decision to run away from family, from the life she's leading and has led, thrusts her into even greater entanglements, entanglements that make her realize how difficult it is to have one's immortal soul saved, even when that's all that one has left. A reviewer cautioned, "An unforgettable novel. You'll love Miss Sally, but she'll break your heart."