A Month of Sundays (review)

Garnet always thought her father and his people wanted nothing to do with her and her mother, so she's surprised as well as angry when her mother drops her off at the house of Garnet's aunt, her father's sister, while Mom goes to Florida to set up a new life for her and Garnet there. While Garnet's aunt and one of her cousins seem delighted by her presence, her uncle and her other cousin are a bit frosty. They warm up, though, when they see that Garnet is making Aunt June happy by accompanying her to church services and helping around the house, and Garnet soon learns that their initial coldness was really worry, as Aunt June has cancer. Churchgoing eventually leads to a boyfriend for Garnet and a miracle for Aunt June, but the most salient event of the summer for Garnet is the appearance of her father, who, as it turns out, never knew she existed. White's sure-handed and warm-hearted depiction of small-town Southern life in the 1950s shines here; young readers will find the stage-setting fascinating as White subtly weaves into her plot a sense of what new technologies like freezers and television meant to families when they were first introduced. Garnet's emotional tenor is just right for her age and circumstances, as she moves through the anger of abandonment, the wonder and awkwardness of first love, and the initial confusion and ultimate sense of belonging that accompanies finding a place in a family she didn't know she had. Indeed, readers will warm to all of these characters who exude simple, unaffected grace and temperate, understandable human failings.