~ Mary Beth Craft ~

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Mainstream

EMAIL ADDRESS:              mbsc3352@aol.com           

AUTHOR'S BIO:

Mary Beth Craft is a native of Mississippi, is retired and living in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she enjoys writing, attending St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and being with her family and friends.  She is the mother of four and the grandmother of many.

REVIEWS/QUOTES: 

“Mary Beth Craft’s The Maybe Tree pulled me into another time and place---a Mississippi small town during two weeks in June of 1930---so thoroughly that I could see the fireflies in the dusk, hear ‘the little squeak the swing and the rope made as it went back and forth, back and forth,’ and smell the perfume on a letter that a small girl finds, sent to her, she believes, by her mother in heaven.  While the police swarm her home and grounds for clues to her mother’s violent death, she hides the letter until September when she’ll be in first grade and will (as if by magic) learn to read.

“Entering the mind of an intelligent child without sentimentality, Craft has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and Maybe’s thoughts.  The tonal territory Craft works, between tragedy and comedy, had me tearing up and laughing at the same time.  Once you begin this book, you won’t be able to put it down.”  --Patricia Barone,  author of Handmade Paper and The Wind                  

The Maybe Tree: “Mary Beth Craft’s carefully written novel set in a small Southern town in 1930, is a very engaging and suspenseful account of a murder as experienced and related by precocious five year old girl, Maybe Rose Tucker. Maybe’s Tree is a place to which she goes to contemplate life’s mysteries.  The tree too gets involved in the tangled murder plot. In a book which engages some of life’s horrors, Mary Beth Craft’s characters reveal that these can be dealt with a remarkable childlike faith, which is neither simple nor childish, but evokes the best of the human spirit in family and community.” --The Rev. Walter J Baer, Chaplain, St. Martin’s Episcopal School, Metaire, Louisiana