A Son of the Hills

In the threadbare hills of post-Civil War Virginia, ten-year-old Sandy Morley has already learned what it means to be trapped. Born into Lost Hollow's grinding poverty, surrounded by families broken by shame and scarcity, Sandy does what the adults around him have stopped doing: he refuses to accept this as his entire life. He gathers herbs from the mountainside and sells them for coins, dreaming of Massachusetts, of education, of becoming someone the hollow cannot swallow. His father carries old wounds into a troubled marriage, and the whole town wears its poverty like a stain. Yet Sandy presses forward, drawn toward Cynthia Walden, a girl from the town's more respectable side, who might be the only person who sees him clearly. Harriet T. Comstock writes with stark, unsentimental clarity about a boy's desperate arithmetic: how much must he sacrifice to escape a world that was never built for boys like him? This is ambition rendered as survival, and it stings.