Cultural insights
The mark of a well-written book is its ability to enable readers to experience new thoughts, places and feelings through the eyes of its characters. Readers can gain insight into other cultures, increasing empathy and understanding.
Lexington author Margaret Verble writes from the perspective of her Cherokee heritage in Stealing, a novel set in the 1950s about a 9-year-old half-Cherokee girl, Kit, who desperately loves her family despite the tough cards dealt to her. As readers immerse themselves into Kit’s seemingly small circle of influence, they soon realize just how deceiving that can be as neighbors, schools and the government all want a say in Kit’s upbringing and future.
Having lost her mother to illness, Kit has had to grow up quickly, assuming many of the household chores, even frequently fishing for her and her dad’s supper. It’s on her way to do so that she meets Bella, a young woman who makes ends meet in a way that certainly doesn’t sit well with the proper townsfolk. Her kindness to Kit fills a hole in her heart and leads to an unlikely friendship, but also triggers a spiral not only in Kit’s life, but in the lives of all those she loves.
Verble subtly but adeptly addresses the effect of race, religion and social class on reputations, earned or not, through Kit’s interactions, her friends and, unfortunately, the scars left by those she should have been able to trust. Kit’s story is often disturbing— and it should be. Verble makes it clear that bad things can sometimes happen because of ignorance, and if climbing into Kit’s skin and feeling her stolen innocence prompts some squirminess and anger in readers, perhaps change will be the result.
Ultimately, Kit pushes forward as a survivor, determined to stick to her family values in a world that does not value her family.
In her youthful wisdom, she reminds readers that all people need people. Kit explains, “I don’t think you can really love somebody and not need them and want them to need you. We aren’t like silos out in the fields, we’re more like fences connected to each other. We have to have our own posts in the ground to keep from sagging, but a line of fence just standing out alone doesn’t keep anything in or anything out.”
Stealing, (Mariner Books, $18.99), was a finalist for the Reading the West Adult Fiction Award and is available online at www.harpercollins.com or at all major retailers.
Margaret Verble, who was raised in Nashville, is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and has a large Cherokee family, many of whom still live in Oklahoma, the Cherokee capital. She writes at least one book scene every day.
Stealing is not Verble’s first book centered on Cherokee culture. Among her other works, Cherokee America: A Novel, set in the post-Civil War period, “vividly captures its particular time and place, yet simultaneously offers valuable insights about our own era,” according to the New York Times Book Review.
