We Are All Welcome Here: Book Review

I picked up this book of endurance and joy nearly a decade ago, and now in a half-dozen sittings finished it. Am I the only one who waits that long to read a book? Actually, I had read the opening pages several times and stopped because I experienced that chest-expanding flutter of panic and wonder that comes with the certainty that my whole understanding of the world will be irrevocably changed. It’s the same feeling I get with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... of these days I’ll get the courage.Maybe one-millionth of the courage that Paige Dunn shows. Berg based her on the actual case of a woman who gave birth to a daughter while in an iron lung. She clung to life and her daughter, raising her into adulthood. Berg shifts the focus of the story to the thirteen-year-old daughter, Diana, who struggles with matters of conscience and freedom among town folk who daily judge her mother and their black housekeeper. Remember this is 1964 in Tupelo, Mississippi.I was struck by  how everything meaningful happens within the walls of the plain, subsidized Dunn house. Oh, sure, there is the odd scene at the magazine racks of the drugstore and down the aisle of the hardware store and once at the black housekeeper’s front door, but the story was laid bare in the small acts of home life. In the smoothing of sheets, the forbidden peeks through windows, the squabble about where to spend a windfall, the finger bitten in punishment, the proper cutting of onions, the long night-time conversations, the good-byes, the good news.And there is good news. It does have a happy ending, despite all odds. I don’t think I’m spoiling it to say so because the opening chapter ends with: …Tupelo, Mississippi. You know the town. Elvis’s birth place. He had a kind of great luck and then terrible tragedy. For us, it was the opposite.And yes, Elvis does make an appearance. He is alive, if only in the pages of an exceptional novel. Long live the King.