Trudy, the narrator, calls her brother Orphan Jim when she wants him to get a move on, or to rile him. When their mother dies and their father deserts, the two are on their own, scrambling from one adventure to another as they find their way of surviving the Depression in Alabama in 1932.
A sweet and sad tale, with wonderfully comic moments, Orphan Jim catches the very feel and taste of that time and place. And Trudy is a girl in whom every woman reader will find something true and important, no matter what her background.