Run with the horsemen - Ferrol Sams

A boy's account of growing up in the South during the depression era.

Both a rare first novel and a new American classic, Sams novel has been compared to Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird.

From the author of The Whisper of the River and Epiphany .

In this coming-of-age story, Porter Osbourne Jr.

is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the Depression.

On a red-clay farm in Georgia, he learns all there is to know about cotton-chopping, hog-killing, watermelon-thumping, and mule-handling.

School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex.

But it is Porter's family-- his genteel, patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother, and, most of all, his beloved though flawed father--who teaches Porter the painful truths about growing up strong enough to run with the horsemen.

The writing is elegant, reflective, and amused.

Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience .

gifted with perfect timing.

-- The New York Times Book Review Remarkable both for its humor and its sustained and detailed picture of a mischievous Southern farmboy's life during the Great Depression.

-- The Washington Post.