North Carolina writer Kaye Gibbons has overcome a great deal of adversity in her life: losing her mother to suicide; moving from one family member to another after her abusive father's death from alcoholism; suffering the effects of manic depression; and finding salvation from her ambivalent birth family, finally, in the care of a foster mother. Despite the challenges of her young life--or more likely because of them--Gibbons has developed into a writer with a distinctive voice. In her work, Gibbons delves into what she described to Liz Seymour in a 1999 Book magazine interview as "the extraordinary subterranean world that lies behind the action" of a story. Drawing heavily from her Southern background, as well as from her personal experiences, Gibbons is a writer who has, as Julian Mason has pointed out, successfully "taken the perseverance of the human spirit . . . for her continuing literary domain." Her firmly grounded...