Lil' Roy Tucker was just a kid when they put his father Big Roy away in Brushy Mountain Prison for gunning down the beloved Sheriff Bill. In the summer of his fifteenth year, Roy navigates the waters between boyhood and manhood with the weight of his family's reputation on his shoulders. Pearlie Jenkins' debut novel is reminiscent of John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. Like Louise Erdrich, Jenkins is brutally honest about the characters and loves them just the same. From Little Roy Tucker who wants to be like his mother and not his brothers, Freeman whose dead wife haunts every rail car, and finally to a cast of minor characters from Gus, the Bantam Ameraucana Wheaton cockerel rooster and the moths who fly headlong into their own destruction, they will remain long after readers close the book and lay it down. Poor Man's Summer is a story of mothers and sons, of privilege and poverty, of love and loss, and about what happens when men decide there's killing to be done.