This New York Times Notable Book is a heartwarming and humorous story of a girl growing up as her family falls apart in the 1960s South. Sally Maulden's parents are getting a divorce, and she has been banished to her grandparents' home in Coldwater, Arkansas. No one seems to really care about Sally, unless you count her pet chicken . . . But in her new town, she soon finds love offered to her from unexpected sources-including a strip-tease dancer at the Silver Moon. And once she's crowned Coldwater Queen of October, she may even start to love herself a little. This is "a remarkable first novel, bursting with warmth" (Chicago Tribune), named one of Library Journal's top ten books of the year, from an "author worth watching" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). "Fondly evokes small-town life in the '60s." -Publishers Weekly

The Queen of October, named by the New York Times as a Notable Book of 1989, is Shelley Fraser Mickle's first novel. She has since published Replacing Dad with Algonquin Books.