A taste of the sweet apple

the long version

"In this memoir of small-county life, where emphasis is on character essential to the ethics of community, a young girl of robust curiosity keeps company with the spells her people cast. At the center of the book is a poetic and telling bond, and adoring friendship between this small white girl and a black foreman, Joe Collins. There's a tempestuous country-physician father, a beautiful powerful mother in powerless times, and the "wonderfully long-winded" Aunt Tott. We witness the travail of hired laborers as well as the beauties of craft and devotion in Holt Watson's rendering of traditional tobacco culture." "A seven-year-old girl may set her buckteeth on fire or bite her pony, but never misses the silent rush of spring water deep within the greenest land, a land from which she, too, springs. Brimming with unsentimental innocence and the sensuality of furs, tobacco, and her mother's lemon lily beds, she draws a tough-minded, tomboy-accomplished portrait of a girlhood."--Jacket.