Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Orphans of the Living by Kathy Watson centers on the Stovall family’s fractured struggle for survival and belonging across several decades and locations. Lula Jenkins Stovall and her husband, Barney, move from Mississippi sharecropping to Montana homesteading, then to California farmland, battling poverty, racism, and family discord. Their children, especially Glen and Nora Mae, endure hardship and neglect—Glen growing up in an orphanage and the military, Nora Mae facing abuse and alienation at home. Barney’s efforts to organize sharecroppers and build a stable farm contrast with Lula’s emotional distance and the children’s search for identity and security. Glen’s return and Nora Mae’s eventual escape to the city highlight the family’s ongoing vacillation between abandonment and reconciliation. Watson presents their journeys through hardship, betrayal, resilience, and fractured family bonds against the socio-economic challenges of early 20th-century America.

Kathy Watson’s Orphans of the Living is a really well-written and comprehensive historical novel that reads like a true-to-life family saga of life and legacy against horrible racial injustice and economic hardship in the American South. Two of the most terrifying and heartbreaking moments are harnessed to tragedy; one in defense of livelihood and property, and another in retaliation with a brutal act of race-fueled vigilantism that inflicts guilt and carries with it immense generational trauma. Watson’s dialogue is era-appropriate, and through it, we get to know the characters and the landscape, which are rooted in the detailed depictions of things like plantation life, union efforts, and migration, all of which form a grounded sense of the era’s harsh realities. Overall, this is a thoughtful and deliberate piece of literary fiction on both individual and collective experiences when caught between survival, remorse, and hope. Very highly recommended.