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Maybe Next Year is a phrase that Frances P. Carlisle heard often when she was growing up on a hardscrabble farm in rural Georgia. It was an apology for not having money for better food, any new clothing, or even a single toy. Maybe Next Year, if boll weevils didn't destroy the crop, if Daddy could earn a few dollars selling shoes, if no one got sick and needed the doctor, she could have one or two... More

Maybe Next Year is a phrase that Frances P. Carlisle heard often when she was growing up on a hardscrabble farm in rural Georgia. It was an apology for not having money for better food, any new clothing, or even a single toy. Maybe Next Year, if boll weevils didn't destroy the crop, if Daddy could earn a few dollars selling shoes, if no one got sick and needed the doctor, she could have one or two of the things her classmates had. Author Carlisle has come a long way from her early years in abject poverty, but she recalls the days when dinner was always turnip greens and cornbread, and her mother never went to town because she had only one dress and it wasn't nice enough to go out in. In Maybe Next Year, she is Liddy, a ten-year-old girl eager to learn more about the wider world, who has no resources to do so. She slept with her two sisters in a ramshackle house with cardboard on the floor to keep the winter wind from blowing in. The porch overlooked a swept-dirt yard and a small vegetable garden that fed them in the summer; they had no jars to can the food for winter. A tender hearted girl, Liddy feels acute embarrassment when she wears oversized hand-me-down shoes to a church event and she barely survives the ordeal of making an oral report at school. Yet she yearns to read more about places beyond her tiny community, and dreams of actually seeing them some day. Some of her experiences are funny and charming, revealing a loving, though burdened, family; others are terrifying from her point of view, such as the approach of a forest fire and when her father is seriously injured. Maybe Next Year is a poignant remembrance--vivid in its discriptions of what a young girl observes about others and how she feels about her life. Frances Carlisle wrote it to have a permanent record of some of early experiences, and to help her children and grandchildren understand why it's important to appreciate simple things.

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