Self-Made Orphan Seeks Redemption and Her True Calling in Immersive Story of the Deep South

Few things can cause distant memories to bubble to the surface faster than music, and when Mary “Myra” Boone hears the soulful, gravelly voice of Ray Charles Robinson, she is instantly transported to a time when she was her mother’s greatest miracle — before her own actions lefther an orphan.

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Few things can cause distant memories to bubble to the surface faster than music, and when Mary “Myra” Boone hears the soulful, gravelly voice of Ray Charles Robinson, she is instantly transported to a time when she was her mother’s greatest miracle — before her own actions left her an orphan.

In Goodlife, Mississippi, Eileen Saint Lauren plunges readers into 1950s and ’60s Mississippi, where young Myra grapples with complex feelings of guilt, loss and segregation. By age 12, she’s already had to persevere through a lifetime of experiences — from watching a housefire of her own making consume her parents, through enduring the prejudices of having been born questionably biracial, to the supernatural religious experiences in the Piney Woods.