Tennessee, 1980

Ruth Anna is a comedic, intelligent, precocious, yet skittish, eleven year old girl growing up in rural Appalachia. This is a story of relationships; relationships between parent and child, friend and enemy, young and old. It is a coming together of unlikely allies, and dissolution of natural bonds. This is not a children’s tale. It’s a story about life.

Ruth Anna lives on Lovelady Road with her mother and father. Her next door neighbor is a cantankerous moonshiner named Hershel Williams. Also living on Lovelady Road, are two brothers, David Wayne and Bobby, who bully Ruth Anna at every opportunity they receive. She loves books and has a cat named Snooker that she rescued as a kitten after David Wayne and Bobby pelted it with rocks, breaking its back. Despite the cat’s injuries, Ruth Anna loves it even though “it ain’t natural for cats to walk sideways.”

From the very beginning, we learn of Ruth Anna’s bumpy relationship with her mother (Alice). Her mother is “a fire and brimstone Baptist” who gives folks “her eye.” According to Ruth, it is the same eye Mama gives to everyone “she’s convinced is on their way to hell,” and despite the fact that Ruth Anna is only eleven and “believes women burp their babies up,” her mother is always telling her that boys will bring about her ruin. Ruth Anna’s father (Davis) is an intelligent man who drives a bulldozer for a living. He and his daughter have a relationship that allows Ruth Anna to be herself, although her father does believe she can be “trying.”