Please do not let the title of this book make you stroll on by. I think the chosen title is a big miss for this wonderful book. I was sucked into this book from the very beginning! I just could not set it down without continually thinking about it. Readers who enjoy historical fiction in southern settings will want to add this to their list.

This is a story about three women in the south in 1924. Annie Cole who is an elderly, stubborn mother estranged from her daughters. Retta, who works for the Coles - the family who onced owned her family. Gertrude, a mother of 4 in extreme poverty with an abusive husband. This is a story about women and all the heartache and oppression they have felt all their lives.

Over the unfolding of the pages, these women’s stories and lives converge together. It’s about how women can and do save each other - and about how they find the strength and resilience through motherhood to take care of their own.

Three women must come to an acceptance and understanding of each other to survive the dark days before the Great Depression in 1924 South Carolina. Annie is the public face of the Cole family, a plantation owner who has had to come to terms with her failing crops and is still dealing with the loss of the plantations “free labor”. Retta was never a slave, but her parents were and although she isn’t owned by the Coles, she works for them. And Gertrude, at the mercy of an abusive husband, must find a way to keep her four children fed and safe. This story drew me right in, Spera does an amazing job of bringing a South still struggling to find its way more than fifty years after the Civil War.