title: The Water and the Blood: A Novel
author:  Nancy E Turner 
description: Turner, the 2001 finalist for the Willa Cather Award (These Is My Words), mesmerizes once again with an East Texas period piece, starring a young heroine who struggles to escape her abusive mother and smalltown limitations. "We set fire to the Nigra church after the Junior-Senior Halloween costume party": unknown to all but one in a motley group of high school friends, this apparently thoughtless act of vandalism in 1942 Sabine, Tex., hides a darker evil that will haunt them all. Philadelphia "Frosty" Summers was there that night, but the lonely girl whose impoverished family had moved seven times in two years said nothing, even though the congregation of that church, the Missionary Way Evangelicle [sic] Temple, had befriended and supported her. Sheriff John Moultrie's efforts to identify the perpetrators, whose innocent "prank" obscures a murder, weave throughout this coming-of-age WWII tale. Narrator Frosty anchors this portrait of repressive Southern religious dogma, racial bigotry, poverty and cruel ignorance. After graduation, Frosty escapes the confines of Sabine by convincing her parents she must travel to southern California to work in a factory to help the war effort. While there she meets and falls in love with Gordon Benally, a Navajo Indian Marine radio operator who is recuperating from wounds received while a POW. Meanwhile, Marty Haliburton, who instigated the long-ago high school "prank," is now the pastor of Frosty's church in Sabine and a member of the KKK. When Frosty and Gordon visit her family, Gordon is judged "colored" and Marty and others try to kill him. Turner's Frosty is a sympathetic young woman, and the supporting characters are vivid and realistic. This beaautifully written portrait of Southern religious repression and racism is a winner.
zlib_text: # The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage
  
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  Oona’s blood is a river delta blending east and west, her hair red as
  Tennessee clay, her heart tangled as the wild lands she maps. By tracing
  rivers in ink on paper, Oona pins the land down to one reality and betrays her
  people. Can she escape the bonds of gold and blood and bone that tie her to
  the Imperial American River Company?
  
  
  
  
  
  I was born in 1892 on the banks of the Mississippi, in that muddied, mongrel
  part of the world where the East and West are separated only by the coalsmoke-
  scummed river.[[1]](https://www.tor.com/#_ftn1)
  
  
  My mother was a Westerner, an Amerind woman who made her living on the liminal
  economy of the river, unloading ships at dock and manning short-handed
  steamers. My father was an Easterner—one of those scruffy, perennially drunk
  men who float down the rive