FIVE STAR FIRST EDITION Women's Fiction

The War in Sallie's Station by Mignon Franklin Ballard
0-7862-3377-X, $25.95, Hardcover, 290 est. pages
Publication Date: July, 2001

News Release

In the beginning, God created Sallie's Station. He molded it from crude red Georgia clay and Cherokee-brown rivers with names that flowed. And when He ran out of mountains, He fashioned hills: green, secret places, ankle-deep in leaves, stitched with blackberry and honeysuckle. At ten, Frannie Gordon thought God made it just for her. Her mama called it the "Teacup Town," nestled as it was in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains. Frannie just called it home.

For a brief period it existed in a kind of a golden time warp where only good things happened, and everyone lived peacefully. The U.S. dozed like a sleeping lion, the dauntless ruler of the jungle; downtown at the Gold Star Theater, Roy Rogers reigned as King of the Cowboys, and all was right with Frannie's world. But the threat of evil crept over the land, and Sallie's Station went to war. And then Miss Havergal came.

In chapters alternating from present to past, the novel is narrated in contemporary times by the adult Frannie, now a widow in her sixties, who is attempting to cope with the changes in her life which include breast cancer. The friends Frannie knew in childhood still have a prominent place in her world. Because of incidents that happened years before, they share a common bond, and throughout their adulthood, the phantom of their former principal, Miss Havergal, continues to linger like a dark shadow.

The dreadful Miss Havergal, although not a German spy, proves to be cold, insensitive, even cruel, and there is something else about her, something Frannie can't put into words. But no one will believe them. And so five children decide to take matters into their own hands. The results of this action will haunt them the rest of their lives.

Many of these characters continue in the contemporary chapters as their lives intertwine, not only because of their common childhood, but because of the burden they share. This is not just a novel about a young girl's bitter-sweet maturing in time of war, it is the story of the knitting together of a community for a common purpose, and the warm, witty, and compassionate people who made it happen.