Set in rural North Carolina between the Civil War and World War I, Love and Lament chronicles the Hartsoe family’s extraordinary hardships and misfortunes. Mary Bet, the youngest daughter of eight, was born the same year the first railroad arrived in their county. As she comes of age during the South’s reconstruction and industrialization, she must learn to overcome her family’s curse: the death of her mother and of multiple siblings, a deaf older brother, and her father’s growing insanity and rejection of God.