The Crocodile Bride by Ashleigh Bell Pederson

 

In the swamplands of Louisiana, a company town named Fingertip was built to provide homes for the local factory workers.  A year's mortgage was ninety-nine cents.  This offer brought a couple from Tennessee down South, John Jay to work in the factory and Elizabeth to keep the house.  Eventually, they had two children, Billy and Lou.  Elizabeth does her best to give the children a happy home, but John Jay has become an alcoholic womanizer who terrorizes the family and beats them whenever they dare to cross him.

Years later, that couple is gone but the children remain.  Lou married a youth pastor right out of high school but left him with her daughter when he turned out to be abusive as well.  Billy has stayed right in the same house.  He has never married but somehow, one day, his baby daughter, Sunshine, is left on his porch and he raises her as a single father.  Billy loves Sunshine and does his best but his childhood legacy has left him with the same drinking problems and depression that makes Sunshine's life problematic at best.  

This is a debut novel for Pederson.  I listened to it and the narrator gets the Southern accent well.  She also manages somehow to personify the experience of children growing up with abuse and still loving the only parents they know.  Sunshine is a tough little girl, desperate to make a home with what she has been given and taking care of others who should be taking care of her.  Southern legends are interspersed in the story, adding a regional flavor.  This book is recommended for women's fiction readers.