Saturday Review: “Growing Up with Tobacco Truths” a review by Stephanie Whetstone of Adele Myers’s The Tobacco Wives: A Novel (2022), forthcoming in NCLR Online Winter 2025
Another sneak peak at a review from our forthcoming NCLR Online Winter 2025!
Stephanie Whetstone reviews Adele Myers’ historical novel, The Tobacco Wives. Whetstone writes, “North Carolina’s long history with tobacco is complicated too, and Myers shows us what is gained and lost in a town’s coming of age.” Myers’s rich depictions of southern landscapes immerse readers in a period when Big Tobacco prevailed: “There was once only glory for tobacco in North Carolina: beauty, wealth, even supposed health benefits. The transition is the North Carolina period that Myers explores…, as tobacco and tobacco barons begin to fall from grace, and communities like Bright Leaf grapple with their identities and try to imagine their future.”
True to the title, this is a book about women, leading with protagonist Maddie Sykes. Whetstone points out, “Etta and Frances’s friendship can remain ambiguous, the tobacco wives can keep their social positions, the women working at the factory can keep their jobs, life can stay familiar and comfortable, as long as nobody speaks out too loudly. Maddie, an outsider, a young girl without parental guidance or many friends, a girl who has to learn a skill and make her own way in the world, is the only one willing to speak truth to power and push for change, even though it is scary and potentially dangerous. What is the “right thing to do” when your whole life and the lives of the whole community will be upended by the truth?”
Read the entire review here while awaiting the release of the Winter 2025 issue in January. Order The Tobacco Wives: A Novel, available on the HarperCollins Publishers website.
