With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

Featured on Oprah’s Summer Reading List For readers of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, this extraordinary historical debut novel follows three fierce Southern women in an unforgettable story of motherhood and womanhood. It’s 1924 in Branchville, South Carolina and three women have come to a crossroads. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters. Retta, a first-generation freed slave, comes to Gertrude’s aid by watching her children, despite the gossip it causes in her community. Annie, the matriarch of the influential Coles family, offers Gertrude employment at her sewing circle, while facing problems of her own at home. These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together. Told in the pitch-perfect voices of Gertrude, Retta, and Annie, Call Your Daughter Home is an emotional, timeless story about the power of family, community, and ferocity of motherhood. “Like Jill McCorkle and Sue Monk Kidd, Spera probes the comfort and strength women find in their own company.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “A mesmerizing Southern tale…Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored.” — Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours

Life hasn't finished throwing challenges at Abit Bradshaw and Della Kincaid. When they meet Astrid, a sprite of a girl whose mother is missing from her isolated mountain home, they get entangled in the investigation. Along the way, they come face-to-face with the lies and secrets of their own families.

If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel! Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner’s Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family’s past . . . Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser’s daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she’s concerned, moonshine caused her mother’s death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth—one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school’s gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the “monster” inside Jessie. Resenting her father’s insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie’s loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths—and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for.