This novel won the Nautilus Book Award and three midwestern awards. It is a coming-of-age story of a southeastern Ohio woman who is inspired to write by her family and small town despite, or perhaps because of, their poverty and violence and because of her Cherokee father’s faith in his stories and hers. "Tiffany McDaniel has given us a vivid and haunting portrait of the writer as a young girl. Betty Carpenter survives the brutality of her childhood through her father's stories and his steadfast belief in her own. A novel of tragedy and trouble, poetry and power, not a story you will soon forget." —Karen Joy Fowler. "Betty is Betty Carpenter’s gripping coming of age story and is bold, inventive and profoundly moving. It is not a story blind to the character’s abuse, but also reveals the love, sweetness, and magic in her life. Betty is too brown, too female and too poor for the world, but her story reminds us that despite all obstacles there are those blessed times when we can still manage to find our voices and sing. A triumph!”—Stephanie Powell Watts. “So engrossing! Tiffany McDaniel’s Betty is a page-turning Appalachian coming-of-age story steeped in Cherokee history, told in undulating prose that settles right into you.” —Naoise Dolan. The author, Tiffany McDaniel, is a poet and visual artist who grew up in the Ohio hills. Her first novel, The Summer that Melted Everything, is also set in the fictional town of Breathed, Ohio.
New York: Vintage/Penguin Random House: a 2021 first paperback edition of a 2020 release. Trade paperback.