From the publisher: “It is 1872, Agate Hill, North Carolina. On her thirteenth birthday, Molly Petree peeps out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild, all expectations overthrown, all order gone. I know I am a spitfire and a burden, she begins her diary. I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl but evil or good I will write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will. Carefully she places the diary in her treasured box of phenomena which will contain letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and a large collection of bones, some human and some not by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003. The contents of Molly’s box make up this extraordinary novel which chronicles her passionate, picaresque journey across the whole curve of the earth through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial—and finally back to Agate Hill to end her days under circumstances that even she could never have imagined.”

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