Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering (Deep South Books)

Judith Hillman Paterson, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, has fashioned a courageous chronicle of a horrific childhood that included an alcoholic father, who once beat her until she blacked out, and a mother who died at age 31 after years of mental illness and substance abuse and left behind four children under the age of 10. Sweet Mystery mostly takes place in the rural South around the time of World War II, during the author's first decade. Seen through the eyes of a child, the book tells of a life filled with grief and trauma.