One of my favorite books, A Short History of a Small Place by T.R. Pearson, was recently released as an e-book, so I've been re-reading it on my Sony. (My hardback is in the bottom of a box somewhere.)
It opens up with young Louis Benfield listening to his Daddy telling the latest news in their small town of Neely, North Carolina.
DADDY SAID it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.
From that beginning we eventually learn how Miss Pettigrew ended up on that tree stump, but first we hear, through many digressions, ramblings, and humorous stories (just the way folks sitting on their front porch would tell stories), a history of Neely. Personally, being from the south, I would give it 5 stars, but I realize it may not be to every one's taste.
It was given an electronic release because Pearson has written a sequel about the grown-up Louis in New York.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-...8843117&sr=8-2