Whistling Past the Graveyard - by Susan Crandall (Paperback)

About the Book

Includes readers group guide and discussion question.

Book Synopsis

From an award-winning author comes a wise and tender coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on a life-changing road trip.Whistling past the graveyard. That's what Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most worstest fear... In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. Starla's destination is Nashville, where her mother went to become a famous singer, abandoning Starla when she was three. Walking a lonely country road, Starla accepts a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. Now, on the road trip that will change her life forever, Starla sees for the first time life as it really is--as she reaches for a dream of how it could one day be.

Review Quotes

"A coming-of-age story as well as a luminous portrait of courage and the bonds of friendship. . . Susan Crandall tells young Starla's story with pitch-perfect tone, evoking 1963 Mississippi and its struggles with a deft hand. I laughed and cried at Starla's keen observances of life and family and the sometimes blurred edges of justice. Like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Whistling Past the Graveyard is destined to become a classic."