No Reck’ning Made

From the Jacket Cover

Raised in the poverty-stricken gulches of rural Colorado, Clara Coleman forged her dreams from the certainty of school – a place that showed her a majesty, order, and gentility that had none of the empty anger she knew at home. Clara strove for this sense of stability and became a respected teacher, principal, wife, and mother in Gold Flume, a mining town near, and not unlike, the place of her childhood. It was there that she would spend her life reaching out to children whose hunger for order and justice mirrored her own. But when change came to Gold Flume it brought a new kind of people – men and women who didn’t care about the mountains or the town, who discounted decades of experience and compassion in lieu of what was current or fashionable. These people would change her life and threaten to take away, in a sense, all that she had accomplished.

Author’s Notes

NO RECK’NING MADE

The title is taken from “Hamlet” and speaks of a rushed judgment. The novel is my bouquet to the grade school teachers who taught us how to read, and one of whom I was for twenty-four years. I also get the characters to realize that even very strong people have that one place, secret even from themselves sometimes, where their strength can’t be called into play In the novel 1984, George Orwell called it “Room 101.” My room 101 is a little more subtle and much more common than his. Writers often answer or converse with other writers even after the other writers are dead.

– Joanne Greenberg