Scavengers Excerpt: Books

Scavengers_hc_c front panel

The book won’t be out until September 2 (pre-orders available here, all copies ordered directly from Sneezing Cow will be signed by Mike) but here’s a brief excerpt:

Ma did everything she could to give me little moments of a normal life. We played games like tic-tac-toe and connect the dots. She sang songs to Dookie. She read to me from a book called Little House on the Prairie. Ma said no matter how we were living she couldn’t imagine her daughter being in a world without books, so she had slipped it in her pack at the last minute. We read that book over and over, until I had every chapter memorized. Every time I heard about the hardships little Laura Ingalls and her family went through it helped me a little bit with understanding ours. Ma said I should learn to read too, and she began teaching me the alphabet. We didn’t have a blackboard or pencils and paper, so she’d clear away the leaves and I’d draw letters in the dirt with a stick, or use a piece of charcoal on the smooth side of some birch bark. Other times she’d have me study tree branches and find Vs and Ws, or press an acorn cap into mud to show me the shape of an O. Then she had me pick out words in Little House on the Prairie, and then whole sentences. Pretty soon I could read the book on my own, although I still liked it best when Ma read to me.

Previous excerpt (Introduction and Chapter One) here.


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