Why a Booktrail?
1972: In the (fictional) town of Peckinpaw Kentucky,there is a bench built from the remains of a gallows. Called the Liar’s Bench for it knows the secrets of those that sit there and the lies they tell.
Liar’s Bench
What you need to know before your trail
Kentucky 1972
Mudas Summers is just turning 17 when her beloved Mama, Ella, is found hanging from the rafters of their home. Did her husband do the deed? Many think so. Others think Ella got sick and tired pf the abuse and did it herself. Mudas or Muddy as she is known wants to know the truth. And it’s not long before she finds strange papers hidden amongst her mama’s possessions.
But Peckinpaw keeps its secrets buried deep.
There is a bench in the town which has been crafted from the gallows of a slave who was hanged hanged a century ago on nearby Hark Hill Plantation. A tribute, a relic–and a caution- and a trail that leads from the past to Muddy’s future.
Travel Guide
Peckinpaw is fictional yet could be based on Owensboro as this is also a river town where the last public hanging took place in 1936.
The inspiration for dear Frannie and Amos’ Liar’s Bench came from the author’s husband who told when my husband told me the story of his father attending last public hanging – Rainey Bethea on August 14, 1936 in the little river town of Owensboro KY.
The time and place of Kentucky via fictional Peckinpaw are evoked via language and of course vivid description –
“I looked at Mama’s home – the bare windows curtained with nothing more than bird droppings splattered down the panes, it was hard to believe that a banker’s daughter and a once prominent member of the Peckinpaw community lived in this rundown old clapboard held together by peeling paint and thick moss layered over shadowed boards.”
The lies and the liar’s bench –
“When a lie seeps into the very heartwood of a town, soaks the beams and posts that hold it up from the earth, the rot sets to its work”
Two hangings many years apart tell the story of the volatile environment of the South. Mrs Anderson watches :
“A parasol’s long fringe tassels hid the mistress’s expression just as he string of lies hid the truth.”
The troubled and volatile south is a tough place to be and Peckinpaw sounds like a typical and difficult place to live for children such as Muddy. The threat of public hangings and the relationship between owners and slaves evokes a time of hardship, deep seated racism and a lack of deep old Southern animosity at that time.
Gritty, rugged, raw like the landscape of Peckinpaw.
Booktrailer Review
Clare:
An interesting and gritty tale of two cases of hanging and racial prejudice in the deep south. The two cases and the link of the liar’s bench between them is an interesting link and it is at the centre of all that happens in the novel.
The time and place come alive with the dust on the road and the wind through the trees. Whilst most bears witness to the difficulties of life in small-town Kentucky, there are some memorable and even amusing lines
“He cursed loud enough to shake the dust off a field crow”
And I for one was both intrigued and surprised to read of a game called Cow Plop Bingo.
However, the serious side to the story is what lingers here and the secrets of one small town and the complicated mix of characters within it. The thought of a bench in the middle of the town square where the ghost of Frannie Crow sits and where the lies seep in still, was a spooky and ethereal feel to the whole novel.
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