When Rennie Slone's mother dies in childbirth, the twelve-year-old girl is unexpectedly thrust into adulthood. She must keep house for her father, an itinerant preacher who finds little time for family, and raise her newborn sister - a task that becomes Rennie's lifelong passion. Against all odds, she is determined that Sarah Ellen will have the education she herself has had to give up.

This first work of fiction by Verna Mae Slone, firmly grounded in her own background, is set in the 1920s and 1930s in a closeknit community in Eastern Kentucky, where family roots run deep. At its center stands as strong and resilient a heroine as any in American literature.

The story of Rennie's struggles and Sarah Ellen's growth into womanhood form a richly textured picture of the simple, sturdy mountain people - their labor to wrest a living from the land, their neighborly care for one another, their shared joys, their quarrels with the outside world, and their distinctive dialect.

We see the people of Lonesome Holler raising and preserving food, gathering for bean stringings, molasses stir-offs, play parties, and pie socials, pitching in to clear a neighbor's land, assisting at a difficult birth, and helping to bury the dead.