The Funeral Dress - Teaser Tuesday

Today I'm featuring an excellent book I just finished reading, THE FUNERAL DRESS by Susan Gregg Gilmore. Through realistic dialogue and beautifully-written description, the author paints a vivid picture of the people living in poverty in the remote "hollers" of the Appalachian Mountains. This is a story that will stay with me. 

When the story opens, the main character, Emmalee, has recently given birth to a daughter, but she refuses to reveal the name of the father. Here's a partial description of the shack where she lives, as Emmalee awakens one winter morning.

Teaser Tuesday (at 12% on my Kindle):
She needed to pee but refused to confront the cold that had settled inside the house wrapped in plywood and pieces of tar paper. In the winter, it grew so bitter sometimes, a glass of water left by the bedside froze solid by morning, even when the stove burned hot in the other room. 

Genre: Women's Fiction
Number of Pages: 370
Amazon Link: The Funeral Dress

Here's the synopsis from Goodreads:
Emmalee Bullard and her new baby are on their own. Or so she thinks, until Leona Lane, the older seamstress who sat by her side at the local shirt factory where both women worked as collar makers, insists Emmalee come and live with her.  Just as Emmalee prepares to escape her hardscrabble life in Red Chert holler, Leona dies tragically.  Grief-stricken, Emmalee decides she’ll make Leona’s burying dress, but there are plenty of people who don't think the unmarried Emmalee should design a dress for a Christian woman - or care for a child on her own. But with every stitch, Emmalee struggles to do what is right for her daughter and to honor Leona the best way she can, finding unlikely support among an indomitable group of seamstresses and the town’s funeral director. In a moving tale exploring Southern spirit and camaraderie among working women, a young mother will compel a town to become a community. 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read

• Open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here's the link to join in: Teaser Tuesday