Little Audrey (review)

In this fictionalized family history, White adopts the voice of her elder sister to describe a difficult time in her family’s past. Living in a coal-mining camp in southwest Virginia in 1948, Audrey is distressed by her father’s drinking, her family’s poverty, and the bullying she endures at the hands of some of the boys in the camp. Her mother is little help, as she has extended spells where she is emotionally and mentally inaccessible to her children. Audrey’s best friend, Virgil, and her teacher offer two bright spots in her daily existence, which consists of scraping by on the scrips her mother manages to wrest away from their father before he turns them into cash for liquor, going to movies on Saturdays, reading books borrowed from her mother’s uncle, and trying to regain the weight and health she lost to a bout of scarlet fever. Audrey’s wish for a better life is granted, oddly, when her father dies in a car crash, enabling the girls and their mother to move to Roanoke, where, with the insurance money, social security checks, and a new job for mother, they can put together life in a home of their own. This slice-of-life drama provides a straightforward sketch of the White family’s circumstances with a simplified affective dimension that makes the book suitable for younger readers; the prominent emotion is Audrey’s discontent, and the details provided all lend support to its causes and cures. There is a strong suggestion that, despite their mother’s grief, the entire family is well shucked of the man in their lives, and all pragmatic Audrey has to do is to parse the memory of her father into the good parts she will keep and the bad parts she will forget in order to move forward into her new dawn. This is spare on nuance and detail, but it’s got an immediacy and impact that should appeal to readers just getting the hang of family sagas.