I received an advance copy of Call Your Daughter Home through NetGalley and Park Row in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

Labeling a book ‘historical fiction’ will draw me in every time. There’s really no better hook if you want me to read your book. That being said, not all historical fictions are created equal and sometimes you have to read a handful of absolutely meh ones to find the proverbial diamonds.

Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera might not quite achieve Diamond Status but it’s definitely a gem.

Set in the 1924, only a few years before The Great Depression, the novel follows three women living in rural South Carolina. The women are unique and very different from each other – Annie is well-off elderly white woman with more skeletons in her family closet than even she knows, Retta is an older black woman who was one of the first in her family born free – though she is met with skepticism by blacks and whites alike because she works for Annie, and Gertrude is an impoverished white woman with four young daughters and the most abusive husband I’ve ever encountered in fiction. They are connected – Retta working for Annie just as Retta’s mother did before her, Retta was pregnant at the same time Gertrude’s mother was, and Gertrude needing both Annie and Retta’s help if she and her daughters will survive.


A novel that begins with a murder, a carefully orchestrated murder involving the participation of an alligator to erase the evidence, is bound to be dark.

And Call Your Daughter Home is dark. It’s dark in a real way, one that is easy to imagine in a rural place when the world is moving on from one way of life and the inhabitants there are struggling to keep up. Keeping up is a daily battle and when being alive is a daily battle, it can be hard to find light.

Over the course of the story, should you choose to challenge yourself and read it – as you should, you will encounter spousal abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, murder, pedophilia, racism, suicide, teen pregnancy, mental illness, alcoholism, and marginalization. These things could be called trigger warnings, I suppose, but it also doesn’t take long to realize that, in the setting of Call Your Daughter Home, these things would have been and were real, rampant, and constant.

Remember, going in, that the story is set in rural South Carolina in 1924. Poverty was a way of life for people of all races, and poverty can breed desperation and violence. Jim Crow laws were in effect and there was a clear distinction between whites and blacks in the South at the time. The cotton crops had just been decimated and the people who had only just begun to rebuild after the Civil War were brought down again, this time by things they could not control. Girls married young because it was their only option and because their parents decided they should. The things in Deb Spera’s book were real, they were history. That makes it all the more important that her story be read now.

Enjoyed the book and reading about the time period of the 20's in the south. The characters were likable, and I felt, fully defined. I will be looking for more from this author!

I thought this book was wonderful. I loved the way the author used 3 very different women living in different social levels, who all had a serious problem they needed to deal with. The way they managed their own problems while also supporting each other was heart warming and inspiring. I also appreciated the strength of the writing which really added to my enjoyment of the book as I am a bit picky about writing quality. This is among some of my best reads this year so far and I will be happy to read whatever this author produces next.
P.S. The childbirth scene was so well written. I could barely breathe.

Book takes place in deep south shortly befor the Depression and tells the intertwining stories and strengths of 3 women from differing levels of Southern society.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy...

Wow! Just wow! Absolutely amazing storylines!

Looking forward to read more book from this author soon...

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of this book.

What a fabulously delicious book. This book has a fantastic story line, excellent characters and is just unputdownable. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and I enjoyed it immensely.

What a great book. This book telling the story of three strong women whose lives become entwined. This book sucked me right in and was hard to put down. Great book!

3 women from completely different backgrounds find each other and bring out their strengths that they didn't know were there. Annie with wealth and her own company, Retta, her maid and her husband she loves. Gertrude, from the swamps with her 4 daughters and memories of how hard life can be. They find each other. A quick read because I wanted to know about these women. Kudos!

Set in the South during the Great Depression, the lives of three women are intertwined as each deal with heartbreaking family tragedies. This is well-paced and beautifully written with outstanding character development. I felt like I really got into the heads and hearts of all three women and felt empathy for each. I also loved the historical aspect. I hope that Deb Spera will be writing more.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Park Row and Deb Spera for my complimentary e-copy ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Deb Spera's debut novel <b>Call Your Daughter Home</b> is captivating from the first line. <i>“It's easier to kill a man than a gator but it takes the same kind of time."</i> Gertie knows her way around the swampland and her father has taught her how to hunt and survive. She knows above all else that a skilled hunter must exercise patience. Before her is a 10 foot mama gator protecting her nest. For both the stakes are high. The tension in this moment for the reader is wondering which mother will endure. Gertie and her family are destitute. Her two eldest daughters have been sent to live with family and her youngest is ailing. Her husband is an abusive drunk whose wrath has been witnessed by their daughters. Can she repair the damage that he has wrought upon them?

Our second narrator, Annie, is the matriarch of one of the richest and most powerful families in town. They are the largest employer with many of the men tending to their crops and the women working at her store. On the surface it would seem as if Annie has the world at her fingertips. Certainly she enjoys a freedom that the other women do not have. But she is not fulfilled. Her family secrets have pushed her daughters away. She yearns to reconnect with them.

Retta is the third narrator. A first generation freed Black woman, she knows hardship and struggle. Perhaps my favorite character in the book, Retta is a true Christian at heart who exemplifies compassion and empathy. She sees and understands things the other women don’t. As the old folks would say, Retta has "a veil over her eyes." In one scene Retta is serving as the midwife to a young woman named Nelly. It is a difficult labor. The umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck. Retta beckons the grandmother and encourages her and Nelly to call forth their daughters, to bring them home.

It is Retta's voice that carries this message to Annie and Greta as well. She serves as a pillar of strength urging them to push forward and persevere through their pain so that they may speak into their daughters’ lives and call them home.

<b>Call Your Daughter Home</b> is one of those that makes you cry but it so endearing and so hopeful that it really will touch a lot of people.

While Call Your Daughter Home had an intriguing premise, I found the writing a bit too dry to be a thoroughly enjoyable book. The characters were interesting but not fully engaging. Overall, it was a satisfactory tale but not a book I would necessarily recommend for others.

Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera is set in South Caroline in the early 1920s, right after the devastation of the cotton harvest due to a boll weevil infestation. Times are tough and getting tougher. This book toggles between three female narrators. There's Retta who is the first in her family to not be a slave, Gertrude who is raising four girls after losing her husband, and Annie who is the mother of four grown children and leading a very successful business employing many women. The lives of these three women spin together to make a quick and satisfying tale. Read and enjoy!

I had the pleasure of meeting this author in Memphis and this is a book for the soul- it's a testament to survival and especially women's survival. I would recommend this book to fans of The Help, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Twelve-Mile Straight. Call Your Daughter home is a story of three women in the 1920s and what they have to endure and overcome to survive. This was a great book to read to be transcended to a different time and place.

There is something absolutely irresistible about historical books that span generations. Typically I find them as novels that follow a woman, her daughter, then her daughter... but what was even more interesting is that, Call Your Daughter Home is a novel that follows three generations of woman all at the same time... Great Depression, South Carolina. Their lives intersect as they fight their own personal injustices in a small town setting.

The three women are about as different as different can be. There’s Annie, the matriarch of the Cole family who owns her own sewing business with employees sewing grain sack dresses and later, fancy men’s shirts. Annie struggles with empty nest syndrome, her children all grown, and her estrangement from her daughters. Can she find the strength to connect with them and heal? Or is she destined to end her days on her once-plantation, never understanding the real (and awful) reason her beloved family splintered.

Then there’s Retta, a first generation freed slave who still works for the Coles on the kitchen. With the heartache that comes with never completing her family, Retta has a kind, maternal heart and takes several under her wing throughout the book. Retta knows the awful truth about the Coles and uses her maternal instinct to shelter others, both figuratively and literally. I think Retta was the most admirable character in the whole book.

Finally, we meet Gertrude, a poor white mother of four children living in the swamp, whose maternal instinct is also strong. She knows she must fight for her family and she goes about it with the strength of ten women. She’s admirable in her own right. I found the swampy setting of her story to be a mucky representation of her struggles.

Call Your Daughter Home is relatively short novel at 352 pages, but one could almost write a whole dissertation analyzing the title and comparing the lives of the three main characters. What could these women of different ages, backgrounds, and color have in common? As turns out, surprisingly a lot... I recommend this book highly for readers who love historical fiction and rich family narratives. I also want to mention how gorgeous the cover is... is simply screams epic southern story, and I love it.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me a review copy via NetGalley.

The author did a brilliant job of capturing the time period in this novel. The characters and plot were also well written. This was a great piece of historical fiction!

Fantastic debut novel! The individual stories of Gertrude, Retta, and Annie were each very interesting, but their mutual story was just as good. I loved the strength of these characters and their commitment to their children.
This was a hard book to read due to the circumstances of the women, but at the same time, it was hard to put down because their stories were so interesting and well-written.

Wow! 4.5 Awesome Debut Stars!

"Times is desperate hard, any fool will kill you on the road for a nickel. That much is fact."

1924 rural Branchville, South Carolina is where we meet three women with three distinct alternating voices to tell the story of CALL YOUR DAUGHTER HOME.

Gertrude - Oh the desperation to feed four starving children (OMG baby Mary) while fending off an evil good for nothing husband, and can you imagine trying to kill a mama gator in the swamp while she's eyeing you to protect her nest of a babies?

Annie - Well to do, but has heartache and BIG family problems of her own....the biggest. No one says no to husband Edwin.

Oretta - My favorite character who has special gifts and the strength to care for others no matter her station in life....another mother and wife who has suffered great loss....a wife with a memorable husband.

Powerful, intense, well-done story. Would make a great movie!

****Arc provided by HARLEQUIN Trade Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review***

Three women, with only loose connections in the beginning, take turns narrating their stories that eventually will draw them together in Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera, just published on June 11. Each woman hefts a heavy load in life without help or heed. Each is courageous, not so much from choice, but because there is nothing else to be. Set in rural 1924 South Carolina, the boll weevil has eaten the cotton crops with days of depression soon to come, but their difficulties go beyond the poverty they face.

Gertrude Pardee begins her narrative with “It’s easier to kill a man than a gator, but it takes the same kind of wait.” She deals with an abusive husband, always wondering what she has done to cause his cruelty, until he begins to abuse their four daughters as well. The way she deals with it will haunt her through the rest of the book.

Annie Coles, seemingly from the upper class, begins, “Every time the telephone rings, I am amazed,” and goes on to say that her husband not only bought one phone for the house, but one for her Sewing Circle, making them the first rural town for miles to be connected to the outside world. But there are secrets with two estranged daughters; two sons, one with a stutter and one who shadows his father; and another son who carried a secret into suicide.

The third woman is Retta Bootles who begins her story, “I am an old Negro woman, too old to carry a crying white child across town and through the thicket of cypress that leads into Shake Rag where we live.” In the first generation of freedom, she is still working for the Coles. Hampered by the customs of the times, she may be the strongest of the three. Her love for her husband and her faith give her strength, and her ability to “see” the dead, including her own daughter, keeps her connected to those she has lost.

Their way wends toward the annual church camp where much of the story resides. The rural religion of the women, treated honestly and respectfully, is a vital element and rings true.

The book is not a light read, but a compelling one. Secrets begin at the first chapter and do not let up until the end which is necessary, but not “happily ever after.” Once you start the book, plan on leaving the dusting until another day.

For those in reach of the Mississippi Book Festival on August 17, the appearance of the author Deb Spera will be an added bonus.

Richly atmospheric and evocative novel set in South Carolina a few years before the beginning of the Great Depression. Spera has a real gift for writing believable period characters. There was never a single note that seemed too modern. I believe she is a real find.

This historical southern novel sings with style and depth. It is difficult to remember that it is a debut effort - Deb Spera plays our emotions like a southern hymn. This is a book to keep and read again when the world seems too trying or you are finding the daily grind a bit too much. Taking place in the early 1920s in South Carolina just following three years of Mr. Boll Weevil destroying all the cotton, and just prior to the Great Depression, this should be a depressing story. Throw in Mr. Pardee and Mr. Coles and you would normally have a sit-down and cry. Except for these wonderful, strong, spiritual mothers, that is.

Gertrude Caison Pardee is married to a lazy, abusive drunk. She has watched as their four daughters slowly starve down to hungry twigs while he drinks away his pay working for his Daddy in Reevesville. When he starts whaling on the girls as well as Gert she has to make a choice - and the only choice she has is to escape from the reach of him and his father. There is no money - they will have to literally 'run' away, but there is a rumor of work at a sewing factory called The Sewing Circle in the nearby community of Branchville. Branchville is where Gert's brother Berns and his wife Marie live and try to care for and feed the two oldest of Gert's daughters, Edna, 15, and Lily, 13. It is a sewing machine job that she knows how to do, and it comes with a house, but it is not far enough away to escape Alvin. Or his father, Otto.

Retta and Odell Bootles are comfortable with what they have. They lost their only child, a daughter, at the age of eight many years since, and both work. Retta is a cook-housekeeper for the Coles, and Odell, who lost a leg working for the railroad, is now the community ragman. They live in the black community of Shake Rag, across the street from the only white resident of Shake Rag, Oretta's best friend, Mrs. Watson. It is the death of Mrs. Watson that made the job and house open up to provide a life for the Pardee girls. And there is no time to waiver - 10-year-old Alma is skinny and frail, but 6-year-old Mary is on the verge of starving to death. Retta agrees to keep her for a couple of days while Gert goes back to Reevesville for the rest of her things and gets settled into Mrs. Watson's house.

Annie Coles has been married to Edward for many years. They have two grown daughters who are estranged, married, and living in Charlotte. Annie hasn't heard from them in years and does not understand the estrangement. They have two living sons, Eddie who works with his father running the plantation, and Lonnie, a stutterer, and shy, who works with his mother at the Sewing Circle factory, making feedbags and men's shirts and employing 47 women. Their third son, Buck, committed suicide when he was 12 years old.

These lives come together, mesh when the community gathers for the annual Methodist revival the first week of October in the countryside, at The Camp. Annie is deeply into a hunger strike, her reaction upon finding out why her girls ran away, why Buck killed himself. The Sewing Circle is shut down for the duration of the revival, and Gert is hired to nurse Annie, and three of her daughters, already beginning to thrive, are hired to help Retta cook at the camp. And it was there, at Camp, that these three vibrant, caring women work together and clean house.

I received a free electronic copy of this historical novel from Netgalley, Deb Spera, and Harlequin -Park Row. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.