Here, Caroline Davenport shares the intimacies of her childhood in post-war Ohio. She portrays a purely distinct household, several notches away from normal, strange yet familiar, and just beyond her storytelling, beyond the innocent horizon, we can infer all kinds of hardship and villainy. Meanwhile, Caroline and her closest friend thrive in the luxurious imagination of pre-adolescence. As they attend school and learn how to dodge its worst lessons, they also acquire forbidden knowledge that weighs on and transforms their dreams. More than anything, this well-conceived memoir shows what children despise, what they hope for, what they do and say when adults aren’t looking. From heartbreak to hope, Edenic bliss to terrible grief, Davenport shows how children struggle to make sense of senselessness and find a way to live even when the world presses against them. …John Mauk, Field Notes for the Earthbound