Based on the true story of a teenage girl who must forge her own life once the secrets of her parents are revealed.

One shot fired deep in the pine forests of her youth was all it took to change Hattie's life forever. At the age of fourteen, Hattie learns that her mother, Addie, is dead, and her father, Hubbard, stands accused of Addie's murder, along with countless other shocking betrayals. Overnight, Hattie becomes mother to her three siblings while still very much a child herself. The life she had dreamt of now seems impossible to achieve.

How will Hattie break away from the father who prevents her from living the life she desperately wants?

Will her heart ever be able to heal in the height of The Great Depression?

About three-fourths of the way through our life's journey, we suddenly stop.



We stop to ponder all the "what if's." What if Jo had never joined the military? What if Gina hadn't gotten pregnant? What if their choices hadn't taken them in completely opposite directions, with completely different lives?

The young girls of Polk Ridge, Arkansas reunite in Tomorrow's Promise to pick up the pieces of a friendship long ago abandoned.

Jo, an Air Force Major and world traveler has returned home. Gina never left.

That careless "friend request" on Facebook is about to have lasting consequences.

A powerful story of race, family, and small town life in the South in the 1950s.

When the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis sends shock waves across the nation in 1957, widower Sam Tate, a white merchant and councilman with two young children, faces new questions of conscience, belief, and child-rearing in tiny Unionville, Arkansas. Becky Reeves, an unmarried northerner who has come south to teach while hiding a secret past, must decide how to approach current events in her seventh-grade class without getting fired. Gran Tate, a strong-willed woman who likes quilting and helping raise her grandchildren, dislikes blacks and Yankees and fears she may lose everything she holds dear.

Life gets more complicated for all of them when Governor Faubus calls out the National Guard to stop the integration of Central High, President Eisenhower sends federal troops to enforce it, and Unionville editor Preston Upshaw fans the flames of hatred to sell newspapers.

Amid cross burnings, White Citizens' Council meetings, and fervent speculating and sermonizing by townsfolk, white and black, at home, work, and church, Sam questions old ways, Gran clings to tradition, and Becky angers parents and school officials. The unrest brings Sam and Becky together then combines with Becky's secret to stand between them in an emotional journey through a world where love and courage struggle against fear and hate.

A heart-rending story of two mothers-one white, one black-struggling for truth and justice in the Civil Rights-era South

In 1958, when almost no women own and edit newspapers, Pearl Goodbar, a white mother of two teen-age girls, risks her family's financial future to buy a small, defunct Southern weekly. Before she can get the paper up and running, her husband loses his job, a smoldering desegregation crisis flames up in the state capital, and Elton Washington-a young black man whose mother, Sadie Rose, is also a businesswoman-disappears.

The mystery of Elton's whereabouts brings Pearl and Sadie Rose together in a gut-wrenching search for truth and justice and leaves Pearl facing editorial and business decisions that could lead to more money woes and even physical harm to herself and those around her. Which way will she turn when commitment to honesty, integrity, and equal rights runs headlong into responsibility and duty to family?

Both women's lives are complicated further when townspeople learn what happened with Elton. Meanwhile, the head of the local White Citizens' Council stirs racial hatred, and another prominent white man hides a dark secret that Sadie Rose knows but will not tell. The town's former marshal-a white septuagenarian everyone calls Mr. Claude-and a black businessman-Leon Jackson-play important roles in the shocking events, including murder, that follow. But Pearl is key to the answers they seek.

Find out why.

About the Author
Adams, George Rollie: - George Rollie Adams is a native of southern Arkansas and a former teacher with graduate degrees in history and education. He is the author of South of Little Rock, which received four independent publishers' awards for regional and social issues fiction; author of General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons, a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Book Award; coauthor of Nashville: A Pictorial History; and coeditor of Ordinary People and Everyday Life, a book of essays on social history. Adams has served as a writer, editor, and program director for the American Association for State and Local History and as director of the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans. He is president and CEO emeritus of the Strong National Museum of Play, where he founded the American Journal of Play and led the establishment of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.