By By EUGENE L. TINKLEPAUGH, Staff Writer
Linda Leigh Hargrove spent 10 years writing her first novel.
On Tuesday, she returns to her native Washington County with a stack of books bearing her name.
Hargrove’s visit to Plymouth is part of her book tour. She’ll be available at the Washington County Library for a 7 p.m. reading and signing of her new book, “The Making of Isaac Hunt.”
The library, on the corner of Adams and Third streets in Plymouth, is hosting the signing. Copies of the book will be for sale.
Hargrove is originally from Creswell. The 1984 graduate of Creswell High School earned her master’s degree in engineering from North Carolina State University. She, her husband, Claude, and their three young sons live in Greensboro, where she works from home as a Web page designer.
Hargrove’s mother, Alberta Leigh, her grandmother, Mary Honablew, and many cousins still live in Creswell.
Fliers advertising the event are also at the library.
Much of the action in Hargrove’s “The Making of Isaac Hunt” takes place in a Washington County town called Pettigrew. The county seat, called Farleigh, serves as a location along with Somerset Plantation and Lake Phelps.
Hargrove said she worked on “The Making of Isaac Hunt” for 10 years, with much assistance from her friends in N.C. State’s creative writing program. Hargrove’s synopsis of the novel describes it as “a book about a young man who discovers he is adopted and begins a search for his birth mother.”
Moody Publishers of Chicago and the Institute for Black Family Development published the book under the joint imprint Lift Every Voice. The imprint evangelizes by publishing the writings of African-American Christians.
Isaac Hunt, described in the trade paperback as a light-skinned, blue eyed man with black features, falls in love during the course of the book with a coffee-colored Pettigrew girl. His pursuit of his honey-colored mother and white father includes both run-ins with members of a white supremacist group and acts of kindness from a white minister.
Hargrove has led racial reconciliation discussion groups, and her book digs at the roots of racism and offers the Christian tenet of forgiveness.
O’Neal said the library also contacted members of several church congregations in the area to announce the book signing at church meetings.
Hargrove writes essays and fiction. She also knits, crochets and paints.
A member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Hargrove has been published in Sharing Magazine and in the North Carolina Journal for Women. Her short fiction and essays can be found at FaithWriters.com and InfuzeMag.com.
The reading and book signing will be held in the library meeting room. For more information, call the library at (252) 793-2113.