Massachusetts resident Barbara O’Connor returns to her southern roots for her thorny rural tale of abandonment, Moonpie and Ivy. It’s right that the title of O’Connor’s book excludes its main character, twelve-year-old Pearl. Pearl is excluded—first by her careless mother who leaves her with her Aunt Ivy in Georgia and then disappears, and then by Aunt Ivy who takes in the strange neighboring boy Moonpie when his grandmother dies, once again placing Pearl on the margins of other people’s lives. Pearl communicates with her mother through terse postcards that she never sends; she communicates with others brusquely and gruffly.

Without a trace of sentimentality and with the sparseness characteristic of her impoverished landscape, O’Connor places Pearl in a setting where Pearl must learn about loving from what she believes is the outside. O’Connor never relinquishes her third person viewpoint from that of spunky, assertive but deeply hurting Pearl as she navigates her tentative way toward knowledge that people can care for one another, and that outcasts can find safe interior haven once they have witnessed what is possible among caring people.