Somewhere between Yoknapatawpha County, the land of Faulkner’s Joe Christmas and Benjy, and Maycomb County, the erstwhile home that Harper Lee imagined for Atticus Finch, lies a timeless landscape populated by the American heroes of Southern literature. It is not a closed community --- authors like Lee Smith, Kathryn Stockett and Pearl Cleage continue to create characters who take up residence there. Through them, the classic struggles of everyday folks facing world-shaking events and making generation-defining choices go on and on.

Annie Barrows, co-author of THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, joins the crowd as she populates her latest novel, THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US, with a 12-year-old protagonist named Willa Romeyn. Willa watches her beloved aunt Jottie follow a bumpy path into the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) via Layla Beck, assigned to the town’s history, who also reveals their family secrets as she unleashes the truths about its most prominent members.

"Willa is a winning protagonist, and like Scout or Frankie in THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, she brings to the story both the innocence of a child’s-eye view and the profundity of someone exploring the world in a new way."

Barrows is also the author of Ivy and Bean, a middle-grade series that tells simple stories in the voice of everyday kids. She infuses that same intelligent simplicity in this story that reaches into the past in a visceral way. The summer of 1938 was a very difficult time in the history of the United States, and the Works Progress Administration, which included the FWP, tried to find a variety of ways to ease those ills. As FDR put more and more people to work using their particular skill sets, individuals like Layla made their way to small American towns to record the history of the people and achievements there. Barrows uses this as a jumping-off point for a family’s exploration into parts unknown.

Layla is not the usual FWP employee; in fact, she is coerced into it by her well-meaning father. Coming from an existence in which the Depression isn’t as oppressive as in most other places in the country, Layla is bound to learn some hard truths about the way the world works for normal folks. However, she is smart, and even though she doesn’t want to be working on this project, the journey she embarks on teaches her more about herself than about the town. And Willa, the willing accomplice, embarks on a journey of personal discovery that shows her the real story behind so many of the affectations of her family, her dad’s secret life, and her aunt’s secret wishes. Between the two of them, the town of Macedonia will never be the same.

Barrows uses the launching point of one of the most innovative programs in American history to show us how information, in the pre-Internet age, was used to build new foundations for a nation growing out of the Depression. As the world struggles forth, artists were able to use their considerable creativity and skill to make a place for homegrown stories and the small town adventures that have built the nation, before and after. It is a wondrous thing to highlight this particular phase of our history, which is not often used as a foundation for a compelling work of fiction. But Barrows uses it to its best advantage.

“Family stories perform the miraculous task of simultaneously dramatizing the family’s specialness and normalizing its weirdness, so that even the most bizarre behavior becomes simply the wallpaper of your childhood. It’s only when you grow up or see your family through a stranger’s eyes that you learn just how odd they are.” As Barrows explains here, so does THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US illustrate to its readers the strange dichotomy of what we know when we’re in an institution and what we learn about said institution when we go out beyond those borders and look back with a new perspective. It is an age-old story told with literary acuity.

Willa is a winning protagonist, and like Scout or Frankie in THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, she brings to the story both the innocence of a child’s-eye view and the profundity of someone exploring the world in a new way. Without giving away any plot points, let’s just say that Willa changes in all sorts of ways through the truth. And according to us, it is a worthy journey on which to accompany her.