Dandelion Wine

Against the green-ribbed backdrop of the Tennessee hills, Dandelion Wine gathers a cast of the damned and the redeemed, though most are a little of both. It is the summer of 1942, and the world beyond is aflame with war, but in the sweltering hush of one small town, another battle simmers—quieter, no less brutal. At its center stands Shirley Ragland, fifteen, brilliant, restless; born into a place that believes smart girls should marry quietly and die slowly.She is the late-in-life child of a hard-hewn father and a mother who once dreamed in bright colors before life ground the palette to dust. Jim Ragland is steady, kind, decent in that way Southern men are when they’ve come up hungry and worked to stay fed. Ora Ragland, daughter of a disgraced legend, raised her own siblings in the shadow of her father’s prison sentence and never quite forgave the world for it. What brilliance she once had, she now pours into her daughter’s flaws, distilling disappointment into discipline. Perfection is the inheritance she offers Shirley—cold, precise, impossible.Into this world comes Trixie Simpson, the glamorous widow whose perfume lingers in Shirley’s imagination long after she leaves the room. Trixie comes to Sunday Mass smelling of sin and Chanel, and Shirley idolizes her, craving the attention Trixie so easily attracts. And then there’s the Raglands’ domestic, Earline, the Black woman who raised Shirley with the sort of love Ora couldn’t bear to offer, and Earline’s son, Benjamin, whose childhood bond with Shirley treads into dangerous territory—for him most of all.Bo appears like first loves often do—genuine, untested, and full of promise that no one dares speak aloud. He sees Shirley in a way that startles her, and in the South, being seen can be as perilous as being touched, especially when the wrong people start to watch.Hovering over it all is Father Schadenfreude, the town’s brooding Polish priest, a recent immigrant from war-torn Europe. With his storm-dark eyes and voice like velvet, he is a man both feared and revered, a spiritual anchor with the heaviness of an atypical force. To the congregation, he’s deliverance draped in molasses. But Shirley watches more closely. And what she sees in him—what he sees in her—suggests the line between protector and predator is thinner than anyone dares admit. His sermons drip with poetry and menace, a dangerous mix for a town already burdened with secrets. And when he begins to take a particular interest in Bo’s soul, the air grows thick with suspicion.Dandelion Wine is a searing Southern coming-of-age novel drenched in beauty, longing, betrayal, and that slow-blooming ache of girlhood turned womanhood too soon. In a town where women are expected to be small and silent, Shirley Ragland is neither. And as the heat rises and the walls close in, she must choose whether to shrink into the story written for her—or light a match and watch it burn. Read more