Sweeping Up Glass: A Novel

Carolyn Wall

Aug 2009 · Sold by Delta

About this ebook

Destined to be a classic, Sweeping Up Glass is a tough and tender novel of love, race, and justice, and a ferocious, unflinching look at the power of family.

Olivia Harker Cross owns a strip of mountain in Pope County, Kentucky, a land where whites and blacks eke out a living in separate, tattered kingdoms and where silver-faced wolves howl in the night. But someone is killing the wolves of Big Foley Mountain–and Olivia is beginning to realize how much of her own bitter history she’s never understood: Her mother’s madness, building toward a fiery crescendo. Her daughter’s flight to California, leaving her to raise Will’m, her beloved grandson. And most of all, her town’s fear, for Olivia has real and dangerous enemies.

Now this proud, lonely woman will face her mother and daughter, her neighbors and the wolf hunters of Big Foley Mountain. And when she does, she’ll ignite a conflict that will embroil an entire community–and change her own life in the most astonishing of ways.

Ratings and reviews

Sweeping Up Glass by Carolyn Wall is a depression era novel of rural Kentucky. It describes the struggles of good hardworking people and some very evil people who manipulate the town in the background. There is unconditional love between most of the characters, but some of the characters are truly vile. I loved the descriptions of the life the characters lived, something most of us can never truly comprehend. Plenty of mystery, thrills and action. Light overcomes the darkness

I often read books and wonder why they were not more popular or more widely read or reviewed at the time of publication? Sweeping Up Glass is just such a book. Carolyn Wall tells a great story about race, Appalachia, desire and longing, secrets and lies, and she couches that story in a satisfying mystery that explodes at the end so that you're galloping to the conclusion. Although in this case the horse is a bus. Her characters are well-developed, and her storylines have beginnings and middles and ends, so that you don't feel cheated and you don't get lost. And for anyone who questions how a secret could be kept under such close small-town conditions, I too thought the same thing, and then remembered several stories from my childhood that included the drama of a long-kept secret revealed dramatically to the one person most affected while everyone else around them already knew. This is not just a plot device. It really happens probably to all of us at one time or another.

Captivating

About the author

Carolyn Wall is an editor and lecturer. As an artist-in residence, she has taught creative writing to more than 4,000 children in Oklahoma, where she is at work on her second novel, The Coffin Maker, coming from Delta in 2010.