The Truth According to Us

Zusatztext 53917647 Informationen zum Autor Annie Barrows is the co-author! with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer! of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society! a runaway New York Times bestseller that was named one of the ten best books of the year by Time and USA Today . She is also the author of the children’s series Ivy and Bean as well as The Magic Half and its sequel! Magic in the Mix . She lives in Berkeley! California. 1 In 1938, the year I was twelve, my hometown of Macedonia, West Virginia, celebrated its sesquicentennial, a word I thought had to do with fruit for the longest time. In school, we commemorated the occasion as we commemorated most occasions, with tableaux, one for each of the major events in Macedonia’s history. There weren’t many, hardly enough to stretch out across eight grades, but the teachers eked them out the best they could. If it hadn’t been for the War Between the States, I don’t know what they would have done. When Virginia seceded from the Union, western Virginia got mad and seceded right back into it, all except four little counties, one of them ours, that stuck out their tongues at West Virginia and declared themselves part of the Confederacy, a piece of sass with long consequences in the way of road-paving and school desks. Tucked up in a crook between the Potomac and the Shenandoah, Macedonia was a junction for generals and railroads alike, and by the time Lee hung up his sword at Appomattox, the town had changed hands forty-seven times, six of them in one day. Our teachers dearly loved to get up a scene of the townspeople stuffing their Confederate flags up the chimney as the Union troops marched in and yanking them back down again as the troops departed. The fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders got the war scenes, and the seventh- and eighth-graders got the short end of the stick, because not a thing happened in Macedonia after 1865, except the roundhouse blowing up and the American Everlasting Hosiery Company opening its doors. Half the town worked in that mill and the other half wished it did, but there was not much about the American Everlasting Hosiery Company that looked good in a tableau. Sometimes the teachers gave up and killed two birds with one stone by making the seventh-graders march across the stage, waving socks, while the eighth-graders sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” behind them. In 1938, though, the eighth grade hit pay dirt, because Mrs. Roosevelt drove through town. She stopped at the square, took a drink from our sulfur-spring water fountain, made a face, and drove away. That was plenty for a tableau, except that instead of making a face, the eighth-grade Mrs. Roosevelt said, “The people of Macedonia are lucky to receive the benefits of healthful mineral water.” My sister Bird and I laughed so hard we got sent into the hall. Once the curtain had clunked down on our tableaux and we’d been herded back into our classrooms, I supposed that Macedonia’s sesquicentennial festivities were concluded. Hadn’t we just covered one hundred and fifty years of history in twenty-three minutes flat? We had. But not a week later came the Decoration Day parade, and that, I realized later, was the real beginning of the sesquicentennial. Later still, I realized that everything began that day. Everything that was to heave itself free of its foundations over the course of the summer began to rattle lightly on the morning of the parade. That was when I first heard of Layla Beck, when I began to wonder about my father, and when I noticed I was being lied to and decided to leave my childhood behind. I have since wondered, of course, how my life—and my father’s and my aunt Jottie’s, too—would have been different if I’d decided to stay at home that morning. This is what’s called the enigma of history, and it can drive you out of your mind if you let it. Jottie and I were p...

Détails du produit

• Auteurs: Annie Barrows
• Edition: Random House USA
• Langues: Anglais
• Format d'édition: Livre Relié
• Sortie: 05.06.2015
• EAN: 9780385342940
• ISBN: 978-0-385-34294-0
• Dimensions: 170 mm x 245 mm x 40 mm
• Thème: Doubleday
• Catégorie: Littérature > Littérature (récits)