Carry Me Home
5/5
()
About this ebook
Lander, Alabama, 1904. When young Emma Scott claims she has been raped by a ‘black hobo’, a chain of events is triggered that will affect generations to come.
In modern-day Lander, Canaan Phillips has fled her abusive husband and returned to Lander and her fierce Southern Baptist grandmother, who brought her up after her mother’s suicide. Canaan’s one friend during her childhood was her grandmother’s simple brother, Luke. Now frail and elderly, Luke is still living in the corncrib shack that has been his home for thirty years.
In early-twentieth-century Lander, Emma Scott has taken an instant and violent dislike to her new child – a white-skinned boy named Luke. Abused and neglected, Luke eventually befriends Squeaky, a black boy whose family farms nearby. When tragedy strikes, Luke takes to the railroad, and as he enters manhood on the rails, we begin to discover the truth behind the events that led to his birth.
In the twentieth century, Canaan, too, is slowly coming to terms with her painful past. And, with the help of her adored Uncle Luke, she is learning to love again.
This is a heart-rending and luminous story about loyalty, hardship, love and friendship. It is also a reminder that goodness can prevail even through the cruellest hardships.
Terri Wiltshire
Raised in the Deep South, for the last twenty years Terri Wiltshire has lived and worked in the UK, where she runs a corporate role-play company. A former journalist and NBC News presenter, she is also an actor and director. She lives in Newport, South Wales.
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Reviews for Carry Me Home
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On the one hand, I would say this is a very moving story with a cast of flawed yet believable characters. On the other, a very depressing literary illustration of how misery loves company, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree (plus a host of other aphorisms). In 1904, Luke Stewart is born the unwanted - and unfortunate - son of Emma, a teenage girl who cries rape and is hustled into marriage with a much older man to save face. In modern day Alabama, abused wife Canaan Phillips returns home to her grandmother's house to revisit the broken promises of her past. Luke and Canaan's narratives eventually unite to confront the heartbreak of the present with the secrets of the past, with the hope that Canaan might just be able to start afresh in the future.I was, at different points in the story, sympathetic, angry, and moved to tears, but never disappointed and always engrossed with the dysfunctional lives of these characters. Luke's sad life, and how he is treated by his own family, is devastating, and Canaan at once invites sympathy while simultaneously antagonising the reader, with her cruel reactions to those who try to love and care for her. And I even managed to feel sorry for the odious Emma, until her lies were exposed. Every character - bar Zeke, the escapee from a chick lit romance - felt so real to me, that their words made me flinch and the wrongs done to them were taken personally.Far, far from To Kill A Mockingbird, which is the Alabama connection I was going for, but just as captivating.