THE COMING OF WISDOM IN WWII EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA

a review by Donna A. Gessell

Rife with seemingly trivial facts, All the Little Hopes by Leah Weiss imparts great wisdom as the two focal characters come of age during the three years the novel recounts. Lucy Brown and Bert Tucker, thirteen-yearolds in 1943, will have experienced events beyond their years by the end of World War II (and the novel) in 1945. Their experiences transform a typical coming-of-age novel into one that exhibits the coming of not just knowledge but wisdom, revealing the novel’s power to develop universal themes, deepening its significance for readers.

At first, the outside world’s effects seem visible only in the form of Bert’s relocation across North Carolina from her remote mountain family life to that of an agricultural-centered flatland community. Her spatial relocation becomes a philosophical one. She at first clings to her limited worldview, according to which her move is a fated punishment for actions that have contradicted her Appalachian upbringing. Her need for concrete reassurance over symbolic ones is evident in the small objects she pilfers and keeps as amulets. Embracing Lucy’s world, Bert learns to trust herself as capable, allowing self-determination in complex relationships, including friendship and love, and in war. Learning to read and learning to love reading allow her to embrace the symbolic and appreciate the transformational qualities of a good story read well.

The friends experience relationships of all kinds across complex societal divides. Because readers learn the social norms through the two protagonists, in chapters that alternate first-person narration between the two young women, we become aware of how experience is colored by belief systems. Readers are guided through the nuances of society that color ethical decision making. On her first bus ride, Bert experiences “Coloreds in back behind the white line” (34), and Lucy is mesmerized by Trula Freed, whom she describes as a “voodoo goddess with unknown ancestry. A gypsy queen everybody reveres or fears” (25).

Lucy finds that the etiquette lessons her mother requires only prescribe behavior in general terms, as she and Bert must modulate their behavior to be appropriate for interactions of all kinds, from dealing with a neighborly half-witted man who helps them in large ways, to accepting beauty makeovers from wealthy debutantes who visit from New York and practice haute couture. The makeovers so remove Lucy and Bert from their everyday experience that they become almost unrecognizable.

Lucy’s reading of Nancy Drew books furthers her thinking abilities, enabling her to evalu- ate facts in ways that cause her to glean the knowledge necessary to solve mysteries, not only those featured in fiction but also those that occur in her life. For instance, with Bert’s help collecting evidence, she creates the case of her “very own Mystery of the Missing Man” when a local man disappears (91). Additionally, reading books focused on the popular female detective subconsciously provides her an empowering worldview, one featuring a commanding role model with two equally, but differently abled, strong friends who all skillfully negotiate varied social settings, equipped to solve problems for themselves, and for others.

Although the novel is mainly set on a tobacco farm that also keeps bees for honey and wax, a wider reality impinges on daily living because of the war. The young women are all too aware of the sacrifices made by the fighting-age men from their area, including an older brother and a brother-in-law. They see a shift in values as their honey and beeswax production becomes a crucial wartime effort. When German prisoners of war are brought to their farm to increase its production and supply labor that their fighting men cannot now provide, the girls encounter the Nazi enemy firsthand, learning to negotiate good and evil, despite recognizing the ambiguity involved.

The young women witness differing kinds of love, some firsthand, ranging from that of Lucy’s parents and family, to those that are inadequate, including the love of the naive, the lust of a one-night stand, the negation of love through abuse, the inadequacy of heroworship, and the loss of a loved one. As a result, the friends learn from the full range of responses that result from the many forms of love: insanity, illness, sorrow, despair, loss of community standing, recognition of ambiguity, acceptance, joy, and fulfillment. Ultimately, the love they experience transcends the individual and becomes embedded in the community as the

Americans – young and old –learn to respect the Germans for what makes each one individual, with values that they share.

The wider implications of the narrators’ interactions with their community, which lead to wisdom and then to truths, keep the book from being a simple coming-of-age story, easily assigned to the Young Adult category. The intensity of the war’s influence on the community members’ daily lives has magnified the process, and the revelations elevate the applicability of the life lessons imparted to become important for readers of any age or stage of awareness. What makes the sophistication of the two narrators’ thinking even more strikingly apparent is their trip to Bert’s mountain home for her father’s funeral. Both friends at once appreciate and evaluate the differences in culture, values, family rituals, and expectations. They both realize that Bert’s newly-won self makes it impossible for her to live her previously held dreams without a great sacrifice. Her older self is now symbolized only through the concrete objects she has stolen. In recognition of her new identity, as the two young women return to their lives in eastern North Carolina, Bert sheds her talismans while confessing her former weaknesses, becoming even more assured in her choices. All the Little Hopes deftly reveals the universal truths that the two young friends have negotiated, particularly that love overcomes all. The young women have come to ask the question “where is the truth about right and wrong in all this morality grown-ups preach?” (313). By leaving room for further investigation, the lessons learned fulfill readers.

Perhaps, though, the novel becomes even more satisfying for mystery readers. True to the skills of Lucy’s sleuthing heroine, Nancy Drew, Lucy solves the mysterious disappearances, grown to three over the course of the novel. She does so through her newly-found understanding of the nuances of love and human nature. In true sleuthing style, she creates knowledge from seemingly meaningless and unrelated facts noticed in her own small community in rural eastern North Carolina, to build knowledge that in turn reveals greater universal truths. n

2022 NC AAUW YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE AWARD

Micki Bare received the 2022 North Carolina AAUW Young People’s Literature Award for Society of the Sentinelia , a book for middle-grade readers, published by Level Elevate, an imprint of Level Best Books in Maryland. At the center of Society of the Sentinelia is Zahra, described on the publisher’s website as “a sprite-like tween no bigger than a loblolly pinecone.” Set in the Birkhead Wilderness of the Uwharrie Mountains in central North Carolina, Society of the Sentinelia is the first of five novels Bare has planned for her Zahra of the Uwharries series. Bare is also the author of the Thurston T. Turtle series of children’s books published by Skippy Creek.

Though Bare grew up in the mountains of New Jersey, her family moved to Raleigh when she was a teenager, and she earned a BA in Speech Communication at NC State University. She is a contributing author and assisting editor for the anthology Writers Crushing COVID-19 (LightSpeed, 2020). She has been a teacher and, for almost twenty years, a columnist for The Courier-Tribune. She has also been published in Thrive Magazine, Piedmont Parent , and Our State. Bare currently lives with her husband in Asheboro, NC. n

Making Sense Of The Sixties

a review by Sheryl Cornett

Lee Zacharias. What a Wonderful World This Could Be. Madville Publishing, 2021.

In What a Wonderful World This Could Be by Lee Zacharias, we meet a colorful cast of midwestern college students, professors, and activists. We first see these players when the novel opens in 1982 (which reads as “present day” timeline in the present tense) and then, in dual timeline shifts from 1960 to 1971.

The first half of the 1960s presented in Zacharias’s novel seems optimistic in some ways as Alex lives a teenage life of unparented freedom. She comes of age more fully in the less innocent but exhilarating, dangerous, chaotic second half of the 1960s. Alex, an only child of a single parent, is the heroine, protagonist, and person most dramatically transformed in What a Wonderful World This Could Be This is her story against the backdrop of a world in tumultuous transition.

when we meet her fifteen-yearold self in 1960.

SHERYL CORNETT was a longtime member of the faculty at NC State University but now writes full time from her homes in North Carolina and south Louisiana. Her poems, stories, critical essays, and creative nonfiction appear in numerous publications including NCLR, Image, Pembroke Magazine, Mars Hill Review, and The Independent Weekly. She holds degrees from Miami University of Ohio, UNC Chapel Hill, and Seattle Pacific University.

LEE ZACHARIAS is Professor Emerita of English at UNC Greensboro. She served as editor for The Greensboro Review for ten years. Her works include a short story collection, Helping Muriel Make It Through (Louisiana State University Press, 1975), and four novels, including Lessons (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), At Random (Fugitive Poets Press, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014), and Across the Great Lake (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018 reviewed in NCLR Online 2020). Both Lessons and Across the Great Lakes received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for fiction. Her other publications include essays in NCLR 2004 and 2008.

The novel opens in the “present” with Alex’s radical husband, Ted Neal, turning himself in to the FBI after eleven years in hiding for leftist “crimes” committed during the 1960s. On TV news coverage, he is shot by an angry crazed bystander, left in critical condition, then a coma. The storyline then jumps back to 1960 when Alex is fifteen years old.

Alex’s journey from there to the novel’s end unfolds with compassion and page-turning interest: she raises herself to the cusp of young adulthood, though technically she lives with her neglectful absentee professor-artist-mother until the summer before her junior year of high school when she moves in with her professor-boyfriend of two years, Stephen Kendrick, “Steve” to his friends and colleagues, “Kendrick” to Alex. She is beginning that relationship

Not yet a photographer (Alex’s eventual profession), in the early days of the novel, she has a lens on the world, infused by her sharp, intelligent mind. Her perspective is that of the unloved child whose spirit is both distrusting and hungry for romance, family love, and a nourishing, stable home life. But most especially she needs love. Her natural desire for these basic human needs is bone deep and drives her journey from 1960 to 1982. Before she knows herself well enough to understand her essentially orphaned self’s longing and confusion, she falls in love with photographer Kendrick, who actually does nurture and support Alex, giving her the much-needed domestic stability and intimacy: “It was romantic, she told herself, just like in Romeo and Juliet . . . she was happy. The restlessness that had twitched inside her limbs and soured her voice was gone” (137).

Of course, the Kendrick affair is illegal, Alex being fifteen. But Alex’s mother tacitly approves of her daughter’s cohabitation with him. As Kendrick puts it halfway through the novel, “The truth is – and I wouldn’t say it if you didn’t know – your mother was relieved when I took you off her hands” (166–67). So it is that Alex becomes a “happy hausfrau. At the supermarket she filled her cart with Windex, Comet, and Mr. Clean. She read The Joy of Cooking . . . refinished their yard sale furniture, and stitched Indian bedspreads into pillows and drapes” (184). In short, she’s creating with Kendrick the home she never had. Perhaps she’s even beginning to mother herself, while Kendrick shepherds her into adulthood, including educating her as a photographer. Kendrick encourages her “to finish high school. . . . I’m going to make sure you study and do it right” (167). Alex graduates, and the pair move to New York City. Unsurprisingly, Alex must continue growing up by separating from her mother, but also from Kendrick.

Fast forward to the mid-1960s, and “movements” of all kinds are on fire. Enter Ted Neal, whom Alex meets while living with Kendrick in New York. A handsome and charismatic leader of the emerging American Radical Left, Ted lures Alex away from her stability with Kendrick into the “family” of a collective, and his interests become her own.

In fact, Alex all but gives up on furthering her photography during her years supporting Ted’s causes and the two of them working minimum wage jobs.

A subtle exposé on the mentality of the time, Ted’s likeable but suspicious character selfdescribes his upbringing as “Rich [white boy] . . . I went to prep school and learned how to light farts” (43). He had dropped out of Wallace University, where Alex grew up as faculty offspring, and once they become a couple they return to Limestone, a college town, so that Ted can embed himself in the university system as a returning student and bring to it all he learned from doing civil rights work during the Mississippi summer of 1964. Ted comes across as someone who can play the radical – vision or no vision – because he can afford to. He likely knows he’s coming into a trust fund.

The core of What a Wonderful Life This Could Be is humanity’s need for the safe harbor and connection of love – for community and purposeful vocation and for some form of family, even if not biological. This poignant topic is rendered through Alex’s journey to a more fully developed self with a purpose and vocation and, by the novel’s end, a strong sense of what she wants in life.

By 1982, Alex can see the truth that one friend tried to tell her back in the day: “Ted couldn’t exist without disciples – he has to be the hero . . . he loves the way you follow him around with the camera” (228).

And true to his nature, Ted abandons Alex (in more ways than one) when he goes into hiding in 1971. With that event she also loses another “family,” that of the collective. She waits faithfully for Ted for eleven years, using the time to get advanced degrees and a college teaching job, but when she learns he will not recover from the shooting, “for the first time in years she [begins] to feel as if she has a future” (183). By 1982, Alex wishes “she could tell [Ted] . . . what she knows now . . . [that] rare courage is [not] a thing you could bless yourself with” and “how ordinary and therefore more precious is the courage it takes to go on living in a world you discover you haven’t been granted the power to change” (293).

Some readers may find that the core of the novel’s sweeping story is its setting in the most turbulent decade of the twentieth century that included the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the New Left, Student Demonstrations and Protests, and anti-establishment venom dressed in “gaudy youth cult” (111). Revolution-in-themaking disguised as “community organizing” shows up in the novel’s packed narrative; topics of women’s rights, abortion, and divorce laws make cameo appearances. Add to these plot elements, the paranoia, censorship, police brutality, political polarization, activist bombings, distrust of the Federal Government, and changing sexual ethics, and one comes away from the photographic eye of this visceral, visual novel wondering if that much has changed since the 1960s.

One problematic issue with this novel is Zacharias’s curi- ous choice, within the dual timeline, to toggle the 1960s chapters forward and backward in time. For the first four chapters, the reader alternates between 1982 and 1960. Suddenly in Chapters Five and Six, we jump to 1964–65. Chapter Seven happens in 1982. Chapter Eight jumps back to 1960. The reader has to work hard to keep up with the timeline. This narrative and structural craft choice may suggest the inner tumult and confusion experienced in the 1960s that Alex is still sorting out as an accomplished adult in 1982. What a Wonderful World This Could Be can indeed be heavy reading, but I believe the novel’s testimony and vivid rendering of history, both a nation’s and one woman’s, is worth readers’ efforts. What a Wonderful World This Could Be deserves close reading and “remembering” – by those who were and were not present to that defining decade in history. n