Orphans of the Living (She Writes Press 2025) by Kathy Watson is a poignant, unflinching, and beautifully crafted novel rooted in the author’s family history. As Watson observes in her opening notes: “This book is a work of fiction. It’s also true.” Centered on the author’s maternal family, the Stovalls, the story, as Watson explains, “took place in a precarious time in American history—on the failed promise of Reconstruction, the birth and horror of the Jim Crow South, the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, and the financial destruction of the Great Depression.”
The prose is powerful, often lyrical, and the narrative frequently heartbreaking. This is the kind of novel that may leave readers with the same sense of weary sorrow that accompanies a reading of The Grapes of Wrath. Though the story—like Steinbeck’s classic—is fundamentally about people caught in the maelstrom of grueling times, its undercurrent reminds us how brutal life could be before the advent of social safety nets and regulations. It illustrates with stark clarity that no matter how hard one works or how strong family bonds may be, there are moments in history when even the most resilient cannot escape grave suffering.
Despite its subtle social commentary, the novel’s greatest strength lies in its characterizations. Watson excels at bringing her people fully to life—in their virtues and in their flaws—in ways that draw readers into their often desperate struggles. The storyline shifts fluidly back and forth in time and among the members of this hard-scrabble family. This artful structure allows the book to flow like interwoven short stories while maintaining coherence and narrative drive. Eminently readable, it sustains page-turning suspense while offering an accurate historical portrait of a crushing time and place.
At the novel’s center is the patriarch, Barney, a hardworking man with a progressive vision. Yet no matter how relentlessly he labors or what risks he assumes, his gains are fleeting. Despite a bold and ultimately successful gamble to cultivate bananas in Mexico in 1912, he eventually ends up on a tenant farm in Mississippi with a large brood of children and his worn-out wife Lula. Still in her thirties when the story opens, with eight children and another on the way, she describes herself as “beyond forgiveness, either receiving it, or meting it out.”
Barney’s progressive attempts to unify Black and White tenant farmers in Mississippi becomes a central drama in the novel. When he tries to rally Black neighbors into a mutual-help pact to escape the relentless trap of sharecropping, one replies, “But no matter what we do or where we go, we are always gonna be under someone’s thumb.” This proves equally true for Barney: his White skin does not save him from the threat of lynching at the hands of the plantation owner, just as it did not protect him from the brutal thugs of a fruit company in Mexico.
The family’s adversaries are numerous: capricious weather, the manipulations of greedy men, the cruelty of those in power, and the sheer harshness of the agrarian economy. The lack of medical care leads to a particularly harrowing passage early in the book, when Lula’s attempt at self-help ends in calamity. It was, as one character observes, a world where “she knew there was no such tenderness anywhere on the plantation.”
One of Lula’s sons provides the episode that inspires the novel’s title. Left behind with an indifferent uncle who abandons him in a dreadful orphanage, Glen proves compassionate and resilient, though the odds are stacked against him. He is called an orphan of the living because, as another orphan remarks, “You got folks, they just don’t want you.”
Another dominant figure is Nora Mae Stovall, born in 1925 as the ninth and unwanted child of Barney and Lula. Rejected by her mother, saved at birth only through the care of a Black tenant and a wet nurse, Nora Mae grows up an outcast who must summon extraordinary strength to survive. Her older half-brother Glen is her protector, and their relationship provides one of the novel’s tenderest and most affirming threads. Nora Mae herself, scrappy and resourceful, embodies both grit and resilience. Orphans of the Living traces her life from birth through the mid-1960s, creating a portrait at once unflinching and engrossing.
Orphans of the Living is a remarkable debut that captures the hardships of rural Southern life from the years leading up to World War I through the 1960s. Its brutality is rooted not in sensationalism but in historical truth. Who will survive to find redemption, and who will succumb to hardship, forms the fundamental tension in this compelling novel.
Kathy Watson
Watson’s background as a journalist and editor—she served six years as editor-in-chief of Oregon Business magazine before becoming a chef and restaurateur—shows in her sharp eye for detail and narrative control. She now lives in Oregon with her husband.
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