Made in the U.S.A. » (Bargain)

Billie Letts is the author of numerous highly acclaimed short stories, screenplays and three beloved novels. A former University professor, she lives in Tulsa with her husband, Dennis.

The bestselling author of WHERE THE HEART IS returns with a heartrending tale of two children in search of a place to call home.


Lutie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Lutie lives in the god-forsaken town of Spearfish, South Dakota with her twelve-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father. While Lutie shoplifts for kicks, Fate spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows and worrying about global warming and the endangerment of pandas. As if their life is not dismal enough, one day, while shopping in their local Wal-Mart, Floy keels over and the two motherless kids are suddenly faced with the choice of becoming wards of the state or hightailing it out of town in Floy's old Pontiac. Choosing the latter, they head off to Las Vegas in search of a father who has no known address, no phone number and, clearly, no interest in the kids he left behind.

MADE IN THE U.S.A. is the alternately heartbreaking and life-affirming story of two gutsy children who must discover how cruel, unfair and frightening the world is before they come to a place they can finally call home.

Publishers Weekly

In a second Letts title where a pivotal event occurs at a Wal-Mart (the first was the author's bestseller Where the Heart Is), two long-neglected kids have to fend for themselves—and quickly. After their father's ex-girlfriend, Floy, who is their guardian, drops dead at the chain's Spearfish, S.D., megastore, 15-year-old Lutie McFee persuades her 11-year-old brother, Fate, to take off in Floy's Pontiac to their long-gone dad's last known address, a fleabag hotel in Las Vegas. There, they discover discouraging secrets about their father's whereabouts. Lutie gets fake working papers and a string of dead-end jobs. But with the threat of foster care looming, Lutie and trivia-mad Fate are soon at the mercy of child predators. Letts (whose son Tracy won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) manages this potentially maudlin or lurid material with a frank lyricism, delivering a heartbreaking tale about love, loss and survival that will stick with the reader long after the last page is turned. (June)

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