Sour Gum Honey

About the Book

World War II is on, and the present pushed by the future in Bentonville Holler, a place already fifty years behind. Sickly Brad Busby, nine-year-old is, brought to rural Missouri by his family to escape the unhealthy Kansas dustbowl. He is befriended by strapping fourteen-year-old Harry Goodnight, whose family holds to hill ways, but who yearns to see the world.

It is 1943, yet here automobiles are novel, electricity and telephone's a hope. The hill dialect, the comic interface between old fashioned and new-fangled, the community of the holler folk, the Busby's struggle to give Brad growing room when they don't expect him to grow up, and the tragedy of ignorance, provide emotion and insight that make the story of a year in a little boy's life the story of a lifetime.

About the Author

Shirley Haley is a science policy journalist who makes her home in a seaside village in Massachusetts. She and her husband have three grown sons and five grandchildren. With her writing partner Bradie Metheny, Haley has learned to loosen her stylistic corset and spin a good yarn.

Bradie Metheny has had a rich professional life in communications, much of it devoted to navigating the halls of Congress on behalf of medical research. He has met presidents and hung out with Nobel laureates, but he?s never moved far from his roots in Bentonville Hollow. He lives with his wife Diane in an antique house surrounded by gardens.