Sweeping Up Glass

Sweeping Up Glass

Living behind Harker's Grocery with a young boy named Will'm in 1938 Kentucky, Olivia is stunned when members of the exclusive Hunt Club suddenly turn their sights on the two of them, a dangerous situation complicated by the return of Will'm's mother and the exposure of the Rowe Street community's horrifying secrets. A first novel. This debut novel does so much more than traditional, tightly focused mysteries. It has a powerfully, sometimes uncomfortably, realized setting; characters who seem drawn from life; and a wide-ranging plot, bursting with complications. The title captures the book’s theme: a heroine forced to clean up the shards of her own and other people’s messes. The setting is Depression-era Kentucky, pared down to one makeshift bedroom in a grocery store, where narrator Olivia and a cast-off boy live, and the tar-paper shack where Olivia’s crazy, mean mother lives. Someone is hunting wolves out back of the grocery where Olivia ekes out a living; soon she and the boy become prey as well. The dead-end feeling intensifies when the boy’s mother returns. Olivia, pressed for time, energy, and food, must encounter her own uncomfortable past to save herself and the boy. A gripping story and a truly original voice—Wall is a new author to watch closely. --Connie Fletcher Used Book in Good Condition