But as the novel begins, ends are meeting, provisionally, even though the Larkins must pay $5 a month to a grifting overseer to keep a leaky roof over their heads. Larkin is determined that neither Mom nor Janey should work, so he has to pick a superhuman amount of cotton to make ends meet. They've squatted in a squalid shack on a ranch near Fresno and depend on the vagaries of the cotton crop in the area to supply them with a tenuous, and temporary, living. Her hard-working father, and the stepmother who's the only Mom she's known since she was a toddler, have made their tortuous way from Texas to California, and now are at the literal and figurative end of their road. There's an edge of naturalism to Gates' novel that makes it surprisingly fresh after eight decades. However, it's the getting there that initially won Blue Willow its acclaim, and keeps it in print to this day. A lot of bad things have happened to protagonist Janey Larkin, and as Doris Gates' novel unfolds, a lot more bad things might but they don't, and in fact life becomes a bed of roses for Janey, her family, and their friends. Lection home authors titles dates links aboutīlue Willow, a durable children's minor-classic from the year 1940, is not exactly saccharine, but it's sanguine – in the non-bloody sense – to the point of saturation.
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