Things People Got Wrong

Historical fiction · Alder Run, Pennsylvania, 1929 and 1985 · Novel in revision

Alder Run, Pennsylvania, 1985. June thinks she already knows her town’s history: the flood, the mill, the names everyone remembers. A school assignment sends her to Miss Lenora Pike, whose carefully labeled boxes hold decades of local life. But one box has no label.

Inside are ordinary things: a child’s drawing, a pressed violet, old receipts, and a newspaper clipping naming a girl June has never heard of. When she asks who Ruthie Sloan was, Lenora begins a story she has carried for more than half a century.

In 1929, Ruthie studies the world from beneath kitchen tables and along the streets of a Pennsylvania mill town. She draws, asks questions, and notices details other people dismiss. But noticing something and understanding it are different things, and the people around Ruthie bring their own fears, expectations, and assumptions to her life.

As June listens, the objects in Lenora’s keeping become more than remnants of the past. Ruthie’s own words complicate the story others have told about her, and a routine history project becomes a question of whose account deserves to survive.

Moving between Ruthie’s childhood and June’s search, Things People Got Wrong explores family, difference, memory, and the distance between being known in a small town and being understood.