What is known, as Mathews County, Virginia, today was a part of rural America where plantations and farms grew from woodlands into communities. The Chesapeake and Mobjack Bays surround the peninsula with their creeks and rivers. Each neighborhood had its general merchandise store and in time, a post office. The book covers this growth in chronological order, giving details concerning each area and its people. There are humorous tales told by older folk and stories of social affairs. Large sailboats, and later steamboats, delivered merchandise and the mail to various docks around the perimeter of the county that had a total of 44 post offices. The boats loaded with lumber, seafood and locally grown produce before leaving. The general merchandise store furnished residents with needed items that they couldn’t raise on their land or harvest from the waters. With all transportation by boats, horses or on foot, travel was limited. The author walked two miles to and from school and to meet the steamboat in the first half of the twentieth century. She worked on the family farm and shopped from local stores and catalogs. The book contains many photos of closed post offices that sat in the corner of general merchandise stores. It could be the story of any rural community on the East Coast.

The stories begin in the early 1920s when the author’s parents courted, married and moved to a large house on a small farm, where Catherine was born. Life was different by 1933 when the Great Depression reached its peak in Mathews County. The family never missed a meal, but for a time, it seemed they had nowhere to call home. Faith and hope won, and eventually they moved back to the farm. By the late 1930s, electricity became available, and electric bulbs replaced the kerosene lamps. Finances also became available to put a new roof on the house, build a back porch and place a sink and pump inside the kitchen instead of outside. But Catherine battled inwardly against her parents’ requirements as she developed into an independent teen. When her younger sister prayed that their father would be able to have his own car to drive, Catherine had mixed feelings. If her sister’s prayer were answered, she would have to leave the church and her friends to go to another church farther away. God answered the younger sister’s prayer with an older model car. Brooks left the difference this made in her life for book II of Catherine’s Tales. Pictures add interest to the stories.