Laura Jo Merrell

Charity Eleanor Sintz likes girls better than boys but this is the least of her problems. The year is 1972, Tricky Dick is in the White House, and four-year-old Charity has managed to offend the better part of Roosevelt County, Indiana, by not crying at her mother’s funeral. Charity learns at a young age that with rare exceptions, people in books are usually safer and more interesting than the people in front of her and that trees are more comforting than humans; sometimes Charity feels trapped in the wrong species. Left to her own devices, she grows into a random weed that can’t find a squat in the garden. But if the entire world is outside the garden, maybe it’s not all bad.