Lum - Paperback

by Libby Ware (Author)

Lum has always been on the outside. At eight, she was diagnosed with what we now call an intersex condition and is told she can't expect to marry. Now, at thirty-three, she has no home of her own but is shuttled from one relative's house to another--valued for her skills, but never treated like a true member of the family. Everything is turned upside down, however, when the Blue Ridge Parkway is slated to come through her family's farmland. As people take sides in the fight, the community begins to tear apart--culminating in an act of violence and subsequent betrayal by opponents of the new road. However, the Parkway brings opportunities as well as loss.

Author Biography

Libby Ware lived the first five years of her life in West Virginia, and spent some childhood summers in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia. She is the owner of Toadlily Books, an antiquarian book business, and is also a book collector. The beginning of Lum, excerpted as a short story, "The Circuit," was published in Feminist Studies in 2009, and was a finalist in the Poets & Writers Award for Georgia Writers, judged by Jennifer Egan. Ware lives in Atlanta with her two dogs, Tilly and Robin, and a mile away from her partner, Charlene Ball. Lum won the ALA Stonewall Barbara Gittings Honor Award.