Listen up, grandparents, yes, and great-grands, too. Call Me Seamus is not just a teen age novel. It is a true-to-life story based on the vivid memories of it's 89-year-old author. Buy it for yourself to enjoy, then give it to your grandchildren who want you to tell them what life was like when you were young. It will be easier than dredging up memories of the Depression, WWII and days with little money.

This is the third book in the series starting with The Rawleigh Man Told Me and The Red Headed Girl. It picks up the life of Seamus and his twin sister in the 1940s in Marshall, Illinois. It is there the twins meet their birth father who tells them the true facts about the divorce that has tormented Seamus' life. Now, he and Shannon must come to an understanding of why they were left in a New York orphanage.

While the author doesn't gloss over the hard facts about Midwestern life in the 40s, it is the tender story of twins who came to Illinois on the orphan train, were separated at the age of two, and grew up in different economic settings. Now 15, the twins have different last names, but the same birth parents. For the first time they share a single home when Livy, Seamus' adoptive sister, marries the judge, Shannon's widowed father.

If you've ever worn a feed shirt or dress, you will be amused as, Mary Ruth, describes the reactions of her sorority sisters when they hear the story of how she came to be wearing a designer "knock off" outfit made from feed sacks.

This was the age of the Roosevelt's in the White House, and Seamus gets to meet the First Lady when she comes to Charleston, Illinois, on a fact-finding trip for the President. It is the very college where the author graduated in 1949, Yes, a few years later than Mrs. Roosevelt's actual visit, but it's history connected to fiction in a real setting.

Seamus, a talented singer and dancer, also meets and gets acquainted with Smiley Burnette who started his entertainment career at a local Illinois radio station, WDZ. It was a station the author listened to in her youth and is still functioning today. Smiley is a real-life movie star and costar with Gene Autry who influences Seamus in his love of music and is important (instrumental) in the happy ending of the book.

This book is a pleasant trip back into difficult historical times and will give you faith that our country is great because of the salt of the earth people who developed it.

527 words

About the author...

The author is a retired teacher who grew up on a farm near Toledo, Illinois. She graduated from Eastern Illinois University in 1949 and later received a mater's degree from Northern Arizona University. She lives in Phoenix with her cats Seamus and Katie. This is her fifth book.

• We started tracking this book on September 26, 2017.
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• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 263 Pages
• File Size: 822 KB