Goodnight Irene - Paperback

by Jeannie D. Felts (Author)

Irene Shelton was from a rural South Carolina island. Her family moved to Charlotte when she was in High School at a time when "fitting in" and "peer pressure" are what controls the lives of all teenagers. Irene was beautiful, smart, artsy, opinionated, outspoken and very poor - and she didn't fit in at her new school, in fact, she stood out like a sore thumb Almost from her first day at school she was bullied and mistreated by the rich kids that made up the cruelest, most feared clique in the school - the snob club - and in this true accounting of these events - names changed to protect the guilty - she is rescued by the most unexpected person imaginable - another one of their victims. Irene manages to get through all of this with the help of her best friend Jen - the narrator of her story. Irene, who is an excellent student with top grades, has made a secret pact for relief with her snob club tormentors that backfires. She finds herself in a position where if she reveals what she is doing it could impact her ability to get a college scholarship - the only hope she has to break the cycle of poverty for herself. Her actions could be classified as criminal, or so she was told, so she is trapped in a continuous round of servitude to the snob club until her dramatic rescue. Irene's story takes place in the 1960s and those troubled times are a factor in her story. From the emergence of the baby boomers as a "force of nature" in the United States, through the death of a beloved President, the Vietnam War and after, Irene's life events reflect what was going on around her. But the story is not about the times - though they are always in evidence - it's about Irene's life that begins to go off the tracks at one point and how she recovers.

Author Biography

Jeannie D. Felts lives in King, North Carolina where she and her husband Joe enjoy retirement and "grandparenting". Jeannie graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1968 and, until her retirement, was the director of a small business in Winston-Salem, N.C. Art and writing have always been her hobbies and retirement has given her the chance to enjoy working on both. Her greatest challenge, and the subject of her first book, was her search for her husbands birth parents. It was a challenge because Joe did not decide to look for his birth parents until he was in his 60s when much of the trail had gone very cold. It was an interesting and very rewarding search with a happy ending.