‘Mysteries Are Everywhere’

An Eastern North Carolina girl, 13-year-old Lucy Brown has kind and loving parents, hovers on the verge of womanhood, collects what her brother calls “ten-dollar words,” and is an ardent fan of the Nancy Drew mysteries. 

It’s 1943, and like everyone else in her community, Lucy also finds herself swept up in the war against the Japanese and Germans. Her brother-in-law and older brother are both fighting overseas, and the government has asked her father to expand his bee hive operation because the military needs wax for waterproofing tent canvas and lubricating ammunition.

Born and raised in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Allie Bert Tucker is in many ways Lucy’s exact opposite. Dirt poor and barely literate, she is a spitfire and a born rebel. When her mother dies in childbirth—Bert had run off that day and blames herself for this catastrophe—her father dispatches her to the other side of the state to live with a pregnant aunt. On her arrival, Bert finds that her Aunt Violet has gone insane, so she goes to live with the Brown family and her new best friend, Lucy, after Violet is hospitalized.

In her novel All The Little Hopes, Leah Weiss explores the friendship of these two teenagers, the sometimes-tangled relationships of Riverton, the community in which they live, and the impact of the war on the town. Not only have so many young men left to serve in the military, but like other places in the state, Riverton also becomes host to a German prisoner-of-war camp. The war comes directly to the Brown household in the form of a telegram informing Lucy’s pregnant sister, Helen, that her husband is missing in action. 

Meanwhile, Larry Crumbie, the brutal husband of Allie’s aunt, has disappeared. Inspired by her beloved Nancy Drew, Lucy suspects foul play and persuades Bert to help her solve this mystery. They soon come to learn everything they can about the man and eventually get into serious trouble with Lucy’s parents when their investigation leads them to a neighbor’s barn and Crumbie’s truck. The plot thickens when two other men, both in their way as despicable as the appropriately named Crumbie, also vanish without a trace. 

All The Little Hopes is a finely written novel, poetic at times in its descriptions and true to the dialect of the region. Here, for example, Weiss describes Lucy’s affection for Nancy Drew and the aunt who keeps her supplied in these books, and her fascination with Trula Freed, a local woman with psychic powers:

“I’m besotted with the mystery of Trula Freed, and Nancy Drew is partly to blame. Aunt Fanniebelle started it when she gave me the first six Nancy Drew books that her daughter Patricia cast off. Some of the spines weren’t even cracked open, so I know my older cousin wasn’t as bewitched as I am over Nancy Drew’s detective proficiencies… For all her etiquette lessons and lace-collared dresses, my aunt understands the desire hidden in my quixotic heart, for mysteries are everywhere—the magic of Trual Freed, Cora Brown’s pale condition, the crisp on Mama’s lacy cornbread, and the lost city of Atlantis, to name a few. It was Socrates who said To know is to know you know nothing. I aim to know something.”

All The Little Hopes offers other gifts to its readers, as well. Weiss shifts adroitly between her two narrators, Lucy and Bert, and uses their different personalities, which sometimes fiercely clash, to explore their growth into adulthood. Like the characters in any good coming-of-age story, Lucy and Bert stumble and make mistakes, learn various secrets of the people around them, and have their eyes opened by these insights into human nature. 

Weiss opens our own eyes as well by so faithfully recreating this time and place. Tobacco is king of the state’s crops in these years, news travels more slowly, reading, movies, and the radio are the chief forms of entertainment, and except for small children, everyone works. Lucy and Bert, for example, not only perform household chores, but are also pressed into helping service the hives of the honeybees as Daddy expands his operations to fulfill his contract with the government.

Finally, All The Little Hopes faithfully recreates life on the home front during the war. The war may be faraway, but it hovers like a dark cloud over Riverton. Families dread the arrival of a telegram announcing the fate of a beloved son or father, rationing brings changes in everything from food preparation to moonshining, and soldiers broken by combat come limping home. 

One of these wounded soldiers is Whiz Mayhew, an African-American neighbor of the Browns. Here Weiss errs in her timeline of history, for it’s February 1944 when Whiz returns home, and though he describes fighting Nazis in France, the Allies would not invade that country for another five months. Moreover, African-Americans in the European Theater didn’t see combat until November 1944, when the 761 Tank Battalion was assigned to the forces of General George Patton. 

That quibble aside, All The Little Hopes with its mysteries, its vivid characters, and its well-constructed narrative is a novel of heart and depth that readers will remember long after finishing the book.