Clara's Best

The following novel, while historical fiction, is, for the most part, historically accurate. It chronicles the trials and tribulations of my Irish ancestors as told in the words of my great-grandmother, Clara Kinnie Stancil. It encompasses the years from 1850 until the early years of the 1940s. While told with deep sincerity and an eye for humor, it shares, in occasionally painful detail, Clara's most personal account of her own experiences and our country's many successes and frequent failures. As such it is, on occasion, deadly serious. I relate it here as faithfully as I'm able and just as it was told to me by my grandmother, Clara's daughter, Ivy.