Read Online Gifts: A Southern Story Narrated By Augusta Trobaugh Formatted As Paperback

thes, young Jessica Southern born but “being Yankee raised” spends Christmas in the small town of Galilee, Georgia, in the company of her GreatAunt Kate, two other aunts, and a cousin.
During this relatively brief visit, Jessica is subjected to full “Southernization” by the entire family,

As one means of teaching Jessica “who she is,” they tell her the family story of the J.
P. Stevens Percale sheet, a singular present that has circulated back and forth between GreatAunt Kate and her late husbands Aunt Frances in Dallas for over forty years.
The story of how that tradition began and why it continued for so long provides Jessica with her greatest lesson in the crashcourse of Southern culture and manners.
Conversely, she is also initiated into the brutal burden of Southern history,

Of all the family, only Aunt Cana, an AfricanAmerican woman who has “been with” the family for as long as anyone can remember and whose churchgoing, Godfearing Mama named her in honor of Christs miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, knows the real secret behind the story of the cyclic gift.
Of all the women who try to influence Jessica, Cana is the one who finally leads the child into an acceptance and then a somewhat reluctant celebration of Family “no matter how crazy it is!”

A lighthearted story on the surface, Gifts also portrays the full range

of that eras Southern history and culture: rigid racial and social stratification, a veritable worship of the past, an eternal honoring of Ancestors, an ironclad adherence to good manners, and most of all, the restructuring of memory the art of making a good story even better.
Southern memories

Being raised in the south, this story feels very familiar in its simplicity.
Very comforting to a person living in this complicated, difficult world, Augusta Trobaugh is the author of three previous novels, Sophie and the Rising Sun, Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb, and Praise Jerusalem!, a semi finalist in thePirates Alley Faulkner competition.
She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Georgia, with a concentration in American and Southern literature.
Her work has been funded through the Georgia Council of the Arts, .