Kaye Gibbons has long been known as an inventive and artful writer who can traverse the rocky terrain of intimate family experience with sure, graceful, and inspiring steps. Now, in a poignant tale of a child searching for a place in her mother's heart among the hopes and fears that are buried there, Gibbons moves us once again.

In Hattie Barnes, a child grows up by coming to terms with two worlds - the private one inside her house, where her mother is unpredictable, elusive, adoring, and adored, and the public one of her small North Carolina town, in which her mother is politely known as "the Barnes woman with all the problems."