An Appalachian girl, the eldest of an orphaned family attempts to preserve her pride in the face of abject poverty and interfering neighbors.

- Brothers and sisters; Fiction.

Fourteen year old Mary Call Luther has promised her dying father to keep their soon-to-be-orphaned family together no matter what. She is very resourceful, but will she be resourcefull enough to care for her siblings through the hard Appalachian winter with no adult to look to for assistance or advice?

Although this book is about grinding poverty and a family in a desperate situation, it is neither grim nor depressing to read. Like the title, the story of Where the Litlies Bloom is filled with hope and the heroine's approach to her family's troubles ensures that you will want to keep reading. The heroine is fourteen year old Mary Call Luther, the second daughter of Roy Luther. Despite great heardship and the seemingly insurmountable difficulties the Luther children face when they are orphaned, they never forget their strong family bond and they look expectantly toward the future. Roy Luther has sharecropped for Kiser Pease for 20 years and has little to show for his backbreaking efforts. Even so, he extracts several promises from Mary Call before he dies: to bury him on the mountain called Old Joshua and not to use a funeral home, to keep the family together, and never to let Devola marry Kiser Pease. Mary Call recognizes that the only leverage she has with Kiser Pease is that he wants to marry her older sister, Devola. Given that she has no alternatives, Mary Call's audacity in negotiating wtih Kiser Pease to get what she and her family need is humorous. Also smile-provoking are the extreme measures everyone in the family takes to ensure that no one - especially not Kiser Pease - finds out that their father has died. And, as if all this activity weren't enough, Mary Call and her siblings decide to learn the art of wildcrafting to support themselves, having only their mother's old books to guide them. (Wildcrafting is finding and harvesting plants, herbs, and berries that can be used for medicinal purposes.) Finally, just when their situation seems bleakest and winter seems to have won, the lilies bloom.

The story is narrated by the fourteen year old heroine, Mary Call Luther, who manages to be relentlessly practical and somewhat outrageous most of the time. What decisions would you make if you were in her position?

1. To what does the title, Where the Lilies Bloom, refer? 2. Find out about some of the plants the Luthers gather when they are wildcrafting. What were they used for? Are they still used in medicine? 3. Where is Appalachia? Why is that area so poor?

Appalachia: Mary on Horseback Poverty and Strong Family: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney, All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor.

Where the Lilies Bloom was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970.