Rockhand Lizzie

Loosely based on his mother's early life. Stone's second novel (after God's Front Porch) opens like an atmospheric country soap opera, set in a 1901 Arkansas that is as untamed as its resident snakes and bears. When ""going on seven"" Lizzie Tackett loses both her sharecropper parents in rapid succession, she and her siblings are scattered by the courts. Lizzie goes to live with kindly Miz Robbins, who all too soon is murdered by her husband, an escapee from the insane asylum. Lizzie next finds a welcoming home with ""Aunt"" Maud and ""Uncle"" Billy, a rockhound and moonshiner, who fosters her uncommon talent for pitching ""worshers"" (the washers commonly used on wagon wheels) and teaches her to live by her wits. When Uncle Billy is falsely accused of murder, 12-year-oldLizzie lights out for Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) to find her siblings and to uncover the evidence that will exonerate Uncle Billy. Part Indian herself, Lizzie finds that extraordinary pitching earns her the Indian nickname ""Rockhand"" and gets her out of more than one scrape. Despite the hardships she survives, resilient Lizzie is a lighthearted narrator, and one who prides herself on having a ""conniving mind."" With the gumption of a female Tom Sawyer, she proves herself capable of devising gleefully original forms of revenge for those who cross her, and she forges a worthy life for herself out of difficult times. Stone doesn't gloss over the hardscrabble realities of the frontier era, but he imbues his heroine with enough sheer verve to produce a highly engaging tale. (July)