Excerpt from Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And she did, Delvin would think, marveling. He liked to walk off by himself along the grassy ravine that separated Red Row from white town. The ravine or gully was deep and craggy with outcroppings of gray mica-flecked granite. At the bottom flowed a constant stream that ran thin and rusty in dry times and heavy, clumsy and milky with mountain runoff, after a rain. The ravine ran up through neighborhood and woods until it folded itself back into the mountains where among the sassafras and laurel sticks Delvin liked to lie down and dream about his life. His mother read to him from a book of French kings—another customer gift—and he saw himself not as one of them exactly but as one of their company, a gallant lieutenant of kings, the one sent out into the wilderness to find a place for people to settle, some sweet land that had grapevines and wild strawberries and blueberry bushes growing in clumps and sweet apple trees you could pick little striped apples from and carry around in your pockets to munch on. In the dusk of a summer afternoon he would walk down the center of the street carrying a stalk of sugar cane or a bottle of buttermilk given to him by Mr. J W for his mama and he would caper as if the street was a rope he was balancing on—he was always teaching himself how to stay upright, keep from falling—and he didn't want to tell his mother that the good things he brought her were gifts from somebody else.

Excerpted from Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Charlie Smith. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.