Odyssey of Innocents
 Donnie Kingman
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Writer's Showcase
  ISBN: 0595004776
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It is 1936 & Donnie & Will have high hopes & $30 in their pockets as they leave the dust bowl farms of Texas to head west to California.

This is a true story that reads like an adventure story, of a sixteen year-old bride's travels, hardships & triumphs during the Great Depression. Donnie who has never been more than sixty miles away from her parents' & grandparents' homes, & now, with her young husband, she's off to California “the land of sunshine and oranges; the land where everyone finds a job.”

Texas has been in a drought for years, there's no cotton to pick, & any vegetables Donnie's family plants can't make because of the dust storms & no one has any water anymore, anyway. With no work, in November of 1936, they neatly pack all their worldly possessions into their 1929 Ford Roadster which Will had traded his red sorrel horse & $25 dollars for, say their goodbyes & drive off into the adventure of their lives.

Like the Wagon Trains of their great-grandparents, Donnie & Will join up with Joan & Bob, who have a small trailer. They too are newly-weds, looking for a better life in a faraway land; & so the foursome set their faces into the teeth of the dust storms, with grit & quiet determination.

In those long ago years, when you could fill up on $1.25, the roads were hardly more than wagon ruts & gas stations were few & far between, they drive until sunset each day, then sleep out under the stars. For all their poverty, & their trepidation about finding work & a safe place to live, they retain a sense of optimism: “We'll find work, tomorrow” is a daily mantra on their trek.

Sometimes they do find work in the cottons fields by which the road runs. Sometimes they meet kind folks, with a little to spare, sometimes they don't, & they must drive on the next day, after breaking their fast with a mess of oatmeal.

Always, Donnie's memories of her family keep her company. The funny & dour sayings of her grandparents, the comforting kindness of her parents.

Will, filled with the ingenuity of the young, keeps the Roadster working, walks miles to look for work in whatever fields he can find, talking & listening at every stop, to whoever else is on the road. Donnie spends her days hauling water from whatever source they can find, washing their clothes with homemade soap, fixing meals from their dwindling supplies of bacon, beans, flour & oatmeal, & keeping their belongings safe.

Only when they've crossed the desert into Calfornia do they find, even in winter, work in the fields, picking peas, something neither of them have ever done. Big, luscious pods in row upon row. Maybe here they will find a new life?

Then, inexplicably, it frosts one night & the entire crop is spoiled. Once again they must pack up & drive off, this time with some change in their pockets.

Waiting near a crossroads, beside a canal, a gas station & a store, Will & Donnie build a small home out of scraps Will finds in a dump. Here, they meet all sorts of people on the move from all points of America, looking for work after losing their jobs, their homes, their land. Here, they discover how the government can help them. Here too, Will finds Donnie a coconut cake, the first she has seen in four months, for her seventeenth birthday.

To find out where they eventually settle, how they do it & what happens to them during the war years & after, you will simply have to read Odyssey of Innocents. You won't be disappointed!

A charming reminiscence, unaffectedly frank & tender, these memories of an old woman from the time of her life, make for sad & joyous reading.

Once I had removed my Editor's hat, & other than the strange & odd bolded words that often crop up in the text -- something the publisher should have caught -- this author's ability to tell a tale is as absorbing as a quilter's skill at stitching together the fabric of her life.

Odyssey of Innocents is an enriching, unsophisticated memoir of a distant America, of hard times among ordinary, simple people driven to extraordinary efforts. Certainly destined to become a family heirloom.

Well done!
(11/03/02)

Rebecca