The Growing Season Reviews
“A tender love story set in a slum in the mid-South and then on farms where the young lovers find temporary safety in their flights from misery and injustice….The two, lonely and scared share a poignant and innocent love. Readable, appealing, smoothly told.”
– Publisher’s Weekly August 26-30 1963
“ It is a simple story of two runaways who learn that you must stop running sometime and that love can give you the courage to make a stand….The Growing Season has a surprising humor and charm as well as the excitement of its story.”
– Editor’s Choice, Book Buyers Guide August 1963
“Mrs. Speas is thoroughly convincing in her characterization; and her use of common speech in the vernacular is warm and believable. Carolina mill families and the young people growing up in the shadow of the mill have had few sympathetic interpreters in literature and surely not as capapble an interpreter as Mrs. Speas in years. The Growing Season has something to say—and says it exceptionally well.”
– Walter Spearman, Greensboro Record Sept 1963
“In this novel Mrs. Speas spirals a delicate love story from brutishness and semi-squalor…and exhibits an acute understanding of people and locale to achieve an engrossing novel with all elements triumphantly combined.”
– Library Journal August 1963
“This is a protest novel. But it is a vastly different protest than the works of Dick Gregory or James Baldwin. This also is a love story. ..what distinguishes this book is the writer’s very obvious understanding of the locale – a half-baked gossip –shop town wilting under the summer sun in North Carolina. …The protests—against segregation, misunderstanding, narrow-mindedness and ill fortune–are short, left jabs that snap out of any page, rap you on the jaw, then disappear to allow you to continue the story…Read the story—it’s worth your trouble.”
– Calgary Herald May 2, 1964
“ This is a well-written novel of exceptionally well-drawn characters who are, in themselves, more interesting than the simple, uncontrived, and wholly credible plot. …The enjoyable story is enriched by several things: the colorful dialect of the Southern mill-town area in which the story takes place, and the careful depiction of that area….”
– Worcester Telegram, Sept 8 1963
“Speas, with a skill so unobtrusive that you don’t even notice it, has invested this commonplace little tale with some of the drama of an Aeschylus.”
– Miami Herald Sept 15, 1963
