In her town a lot of families come in from Baltimore to help add in a new school where the 'mountain children' can learn. Arie Mae wants more than anything to make her mother happy, and she knows that the only way to do so is to make friends. This book 'Anybody Shining', is about a girl named Arie Mae who lives out in the country in the mountains.

But it turns out those warnings were for a reason… So what if he has a bit of a limp and a rumored heart problem-he also is keen about everything Arie Mae is keen about, and has all the makings of a true friend.Īnd so what if the boy’s mother warns him not to exert himself? He and Arie Mae have adventures to go on! In between writing letters to her cousin, Arie Mae leads her one shining friend on ghost hunts and bear chases. How else to explain the song catcher ladies who have descended upon the village in search of “traditional tunes” and their intention to help “save” the townspeople? But when the group from Baltimore arrives, it seems there just might be a gem among them, one shining boy who doesn’t seem to notice Arie Mae wears the same dress every day and prefers to go barefoot. Three unanswered letters later, Arie Mae learns that a group of kids from Baltimore are coming to spend a summer on the mountain.Īrie Mae loves her smudge of a town-she knows there’s nothing finer than Pa’s fiddling and Mama’s apple cake, but she also knows Big City folk might feel differently. But shining true friends are hard to come by deep in the mountains of western North Carolina, so she sets her sights on a cousin unseen, someone who lives all the way away in the big city of Baltimore, Maryland. That’s all twelve-year-old Arie Mae wants. Can one mistake destroy the chance of a lifetime? A girl discovers there are many ways of being true in this magnificent ode to handwritten letters and the shining power of friendship from the author of Dovey Coe, set in the Appalachian mountains of 1920s North Carolina.

Dovey Coe by Frances O'Roark Dowell