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Last week I read two very different books. Down Sand Mountain is the delightful story of a boy in a Florida mining town in 1966. It’s a lovely book about important things, and Dewey’s voice is wonderfully distinctive, funny, sad, and true. You’ll be crazy about him. I highly recommend you read it.
The other was The Marvelous Hairy Girls, about the Gonzales sisters of 16th century Spain. They had a rare genetic condition called hypertrichosis, which caused them to grow abundant hair on their faces and other parts of their bodies.Grace, a character inWill’s Sparrow’s Road,my work-in-progress, has the same condition. The book was interesting but it couldn’t tell me what I most wanted to know. How did the girls feel about their condition? Did they hate it or did it seem normal to them? Were they always aware of being different or did they forget at times? How did they respond to the attention—good and bad—they received?What would it be like to be considered abnormal? If you have any opinions, please email me and let me know.
