The Pecan Man is a work of Southern fiction whose first chapter was the First Place winner of the 2006 CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition in the Unpublished Novel category. In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief’s son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man. In narrating her story, Ora discovers more truth about herself than she could ever have imagined.
"In prose as smooth and easy as the sweet iced tea so favored by its characters, The Pecan Man uses familiar period issues as a backdrop to examine the motives that drive our individual actions. Each character has to face both the selfishness and the selflessness that inform all human behavior, alternating and occasionally evolving, as they navigate the circumstances of their lives. Although set in the South during a volatile period for the Civil Rights movement, this story is more specifically about how we define family and how, as a family, we forgive the failures and flaws, even when they are our own. Having grown up myself in a small southern town in the 70's, so many memories were stirred by the wonderful sensory desriptions of the town of Mayville...the JC Penney store, the soda counter, the homecoming parade, all seem like home. Likewise, the people who populate the town are typical but so richly developed as to not be stereotypical, driving home the point that no matter what you think you might know about a region, an era or an individual, you rarely know the truth." -Loretta Armentrout
"The Pecan Man could well be a true story. Set in a small Florida town almost 40 years ago, I could almost smell the sand underfoot and the Spanish moss hanging from the pecan trees, as I sat in a rocking chair on Ora Lee's front porch, sipping sweet tea, listening to her spin her tale. The characters are ordinary people, the kind that live next door, or down the street, or across town. Cassie Selleck brings them to life and makes you care about them. Bad things happen to good people, and the choices they make have unforeseen consequences that further complicate their lives. This is a book I could not put down and I recommend it to any serious reader. It is suitable for teenagers as well as for mature readers." -Marie Rogers
