Livin' in High Cotton

Livin' In High Cotton is the collaboration of Sandra Poole and her daughter Jennifer Leigh Youngblood. The story is set in the Depression-era south and inspired by the real-life experiences of Sandra's grandmother. Times were hard in western Georgia and eastern Alabama when the cotton industry was failing and families had to bind tightly together in order to survive those bleak and uncertain years. Shelby Collins was mature for a fifteen-year-old girl. When Shelby's mother had to go off to Alabama to tend Shelby's ailing grandmother, the girl had to care for her younger brother and sister, while seeing to the needs of her father. One night her father came home drunk and tried to attack her. When a frightened Shelby flees the home, her father tracks her down and places her in a reform school in distant Birmingham. Emotionally scarred by her abuse, Shelby is sill able to make a new life for herself and learns that blessings can come in the most unexpected ways. Strongly recommended and superbly crafted reading, Livin' In High Cotton successfully and engagingly tackles such difficult themes as whether or not trust can be regained after betrayal, how can being kind-hearted succeed in a world populate by evil people, and is there a power higher than ourselves that can come into our hearts to foster forgiveness and release us from the emotional bondage of a blighted past?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Livin' in High Cotton". It includes all the elements for great fiction - romance, suspense and action. I highly recommend it!

This book is about the real south and about what happened to real people back in a time that was not only hard for people to survive but hard for the land to produce sizeable crops. Livin in High Cottons' Shelby is an example of how many women worked and lived in a time almost forgotten. I thank the authors for reminding me what a lot of women went through in the earlier years ao that we could have what we have today.