From an award-winning author comes a wise and tender coming-of-age story
about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in
1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on
a life-changing road trip.Whistling past the graveyard. That's what
Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most
worstest fear... In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old Starla Claudelle
runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. Starla's
destination is Nashville, where her mother went to become a famous
singer, abandoning Starla when she was three. Walking a lonely country
road, Starla accepts a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone
with a white baby. Now, on the road trip that will change her life
forever, Starla sees for the first time life as it really is--as she
reaches for a dream of how it could one day be.