by Virginia Hamilton

Virginia Hamilton was born in 1936 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where years earlier a fugitive slave on her mother's side of the family had settled. The family grew, working at farming and indulging in storytelling, a skill shared by both of Hamilton's parents. Hamilton moved to New York after college, where she wrote and began a family of her own before moving back to Ohio some fifteen years later. Meanwhile, in her fiction, family became an important element. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, one of over a dozen books Hamilton wrote for young people, features the family of an adolescent named Tree. Forced to raise her children alone, Tree's mother struggles to earn a living at a job that keeps her away from home too often. The novel exposes the desperation and isolation that poverty often brings but also offers hope...