The Truth According To Us

The Truth According To Us by Annie Barrows                 Audio Book: 18 hours, 52 minutes     Paperback Book: 529 pages                      

This book will hold your interest from beginning to end.    Very well written and developed characters.    You will come away feeling that you were actually a witness to all the events described here.    The town of Macedonia, West Virginia held a very southern sympathetic view during the War Between the States, however, the State of Virginia had divided into two sections because folks in the western part of the state wanted to stay in the Union, all that is except the town of Macedonia.   So, going with the majority,  the state of Virginia was divided into two states forming Virginia (seceded) and West Virginia (did not secede) it was entered into the Union as a Federalist region though the pocket that was Macedonia remained loyal to the South for the most part.    This story involves many of the families in the town who are proud of their southern heritage and held many artifacts of their confederate ancestors.    The story involves the town’s past history as they celebrate the town’s sesquicentennial and a young woman who is awarded the task of writing a book on the town’s history through the writer’s project of Roosevelt’s WPA New Deal program.  The girl in question is a poor little rich girl who doesn’t want to marry her family’s choice of husband for her so she and her father (a senator) have a falling out and he takes away her expenses so she has to fend for herself.    Her uncle happens to work with the WPA and gets her on relief so she can get the job that is open (that requires no skills – she’s never worked before).    She balks at first not wanting to go live amongst hillbillies and can’t imagine how she will achieve the research and writing of a book for them.    The story takes place in 1938 and the family she ends up staying with, the Romeyns, are so endearing, even the black sheep scoundrel has reasons for his behavior.   He does play dirty at times though and uses people.    Their back stories and dark secrets are smoldering underneath the facades almost everyone puts on.    Everyone except Jottie, the fixer in the Romeyn family – she is genuinely a good fun-loving person, o.k. she does know how to use the term “oh honey,” in that sickly sweet way some southern ladies declare that can express  sentiments of sincerity, insincerity, sarcasm and aspersion interchangeably.   I learned all about the “oh honey” and “well bless your heart” phraseology when I married into a family with roots in Virginia.  Yikes!   Those steel magnolias weren’t kidding!   They can praise you and strip your feelings to the core with either of those phrases depending on their tone and inflection.   Amazing.    Praise or belittling and you never know which way the knife will fall.   The townsfolk in this book use it with fierce accuracy and dole it out like icing on a cake.   This was such an enjoyable read I hated to come to the end, I liked it that much.   The children are like the little rascals and “Scout” from to Kill A Mockingbird always up to something.   Five stars for this one.