Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky Book

"Summer came in quietly that year, slipped in almost unnoticed on the tail of a kind and graceful springtime. The daytime air had thickened, but the nights brought cool, sweet-smelling breezes through the window screens."
Lovely opening sentences. Oliver had me hooked from the very first page of this novel.

This is one of those books that sat untouched on my bookshelf for at least two years. You know how it is. You buy a stack of books and then one or two just don't seem to make you want to open the cover. Once I finally decided to give this one a try, I was pulled in from the start. The writing is excellent and the main character engaging.

Callie is a young wife and mother, barely 20-years old, born and bred in the farm country of Alabama. She is destined to live out her days on her husband's father's cotton farm. It's 1934. There were strict standards of behavior for women in Callie's part of the country in 1934. Eager ears listened in on party lines and country-church preachers weren't always meticulous about keeping parishioners confessions private. Gossip, even unfounded, could tarnish a reputation forever and ruin a life. Lives were lived cautiously. People stayed well between the lines.

Callie was more or less content with her life. If not content, resigned. She loved being a mother and was happy enough being wife. Intelligent, but limited by the constraints of societal expectations, she tried not to question and worked hard to accept the lifestyle that God had given her. Then, one day, a well-dressed man from the city showed up at the farmhouse door in need of a bucket of water for his overheated car radiator. And everything changed.

This novel could easily have turned out to be just another variation on the "Bridges of Madison County" but, instead, it found its own unique voice. This novel is an excellent read with more than one startling development along the way to its very satisfying conclusion.