Lawhoma Hills: A Year Behind the Pink Door

A company out of Tulsa has its eye on 163 acres along Blue Creek Lake.

The families of Lawhoma Hills held that ground long before anyone wrote it down. They're foxes and crows and bears, entirely themselves, and they've built a town on it. A barbershop, a post office, a farmers market on Saturday mornings, and a grandmother named Yaya keeping watch behind her pink door.

Inside her journals, Yaya writes it all down. The seasons. The neighbors. The dinner tables that keep growing extra chairs. Skating rink nights and harvest festivals and recitals. The creeks that argue with drought and sometimes lose.

Then the survey markers go up, and the valley learns what it will cost to keep what's theirs: the land, each other, and every ordinary childhood happening on top of it.

Lawhoma Hills A Year Behind the Pink Door is a novel in the tradition of the American fable, where animal families live full human lives and a fight over one piece of ground becomes a fight over everything a place means. It is a book about caregiving and grief, about a woman with a hard childhood defending the peace she finally found, and about what the small things cost when nobody is counting them.

Includes the author's original wildlife paintings, a book club discussion guide, and Yaya's Valley Playlist.

For readers of Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Jan Karon's Mitford series, and Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures.