Betty

Betty Carpenter is born in a bathtub in 1954, the sixth of eight children, to a Cherokee father and a white mother in the poor rural town of Breathed, Ohio. She grows up steeped in her father's folklore and love of the natural world, even as she witnesses the racism that follows the family, the grinding poverty that never lets up, and abuse that arrives from both outside and inside the home. McDaniel based the novel on her own mother's life, and she writes Betty's survival as an act of storytelling, the girl writing down the family's pain and burying the pages in the ground so the words cannot be taken from her.