Addie Pray Author:Joe David Brown Like True Grit and Little Big Man, Addie Pray is one of those rare and magic novels that bring to life a whole era in the person of a central character and in the form of a story so convincing, human and entertaining as be worthy of Mark Twain. — The heroine of Joe David Brown's new novel is Miss Addie Pray, an eleven-year-old orphan of monumenta... more »l shrewdness, who becomes the willing and imaginative confederate of her conman companion Long Boy in the darkest days of the Depression.
Together, they embark on a series of confidence tricks that take them from one end of the South to the other, beginning with the selling of gold-initialed Bibles, moving on to the more rewarding businesses of hawking pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt, basic and refined wallet switching, trading in nonexistent cotten crops and taking a risky flier in bootleg whiskey...until they meet Major Carter E. Lee, who not only introduces them to a far more ambitious kind of swindle but sets Addie up for a million-dollar scheme as the heiress to a great fortune, and almost, almost makes her a respectable young lady.
Addie Pray is one of the most engaging pieces of fiction to come down the pike in a long, long time, as warm, funny, hard-edged and no-nonsense as its remarkable young heroine-and destined, we believe, to become a permanent piece of fictional Americana.« less