John Omwake

Limestone County John Omwake

A moving and poignant look at rural life in the recent past, LIMESTONE COUNTY chronicles, across a span of thirty years, the comings and goings in an isolated and mountainous locality inhabited by substantial, believable, and interesting people who are worth reading about. They include an outsider who accused a local man of a heinous crime, but does not count on the ways of small-town justice; a young woman of sullied reputation searching for a good man to marry; the aging sheriff who wants no trouble on his watch; the newspaper publisher whose weekly Limestone Echo is the county's bible; an old lady whose quiet life takes a public turn when she grows a sensationally large tomato; and the banker who sees the region through the dark years of the Great Depression. Finally, there is beautiful, strong-willed Rebecca Rankin, whose unflinching determination to restore, in the face of daunting odds, the fortunes of her family, the first to settle in what became Limestone County, propels much of the narrative. What emerges is a portrait of a community that is as complex, tender, comical, and tragic as the people who live in it.