Trailer Park Tuesday: Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night by Barbara J. Taylor

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

The true-life story behind Barbara J. Taylor's debut novel, Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night, is so dramatic that I'll just let the author tell it in her own words: "The story takes place in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1913-1914.  That was the time of coal mining, vaudeville, evangelism--so there was a lot happening in Scranton at the time.  I got the idea for my novel from a family story.  My grandmother's sister Pearl, on the day she was baptized--it happened to be the Fourth of July--she and her friends were playing with sparklers in the backyard and her dress went up in flames.  She survived for three days and, according to the stories, she sang hymns.  As sad as it was what happened to Pearl, I was always interested in her sister Janet who was in the yard that day.  She was only six years old, but nobody ever talked about the tragedy in front of Janet.  She didn't have a very happy life.  I always wondered how much of that stemmed from what she saw in the yard that day."  Taylor fictionalizes her family history and focuses on the repercussions suffered by eight-year-old Violet Morgan for the death of her nine-year-old sister, Daisy.  It's all about guilt, ostracism and the crumbling breakdown of a family in the wake of tragedy.  The book trailer, narrated by Taylor, is a smoothly-edited slide show of newspaper clippings and family photos--including a haunting, heartbreaking one of Pearl and Janet, wearing white dresses and smiling at the camera on the morning of the accident.  Here's what Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female, has to say about the novel: "Not since reading Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley fifty years ago have I felt such empathy and love through fiction for a place, a time, and a people.  Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night is a book of equal power and beauty, a bittersweet tale set in early-twentieth-century Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, the heart and soul of America's anthracite coal-mining region, a place where Grace and Grief--now, as then--walk hand in hand."  Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night is perched high in my To-Be-Read pile and I have a feeling it will be in yours as well.