Mickey Burrs On Tuesday, March 17, 2009, Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entry Mill Girl by Mickey Burris of Eastover was selected to move forward in the contest to quarterfinalist. Amazon customers can read, rate, and review an excerpt while the manuscript is being reviewed by Publishers Weekly. More than 5,000 submissions competed. The top 100 will be announced on April 15. Entries are located at www.amazon.com/aba.

Mill Girl is set in Tugaloo, a fictional- upstate mill town and shows a glimpse of the existence endured by a girl spinning in a southern mill and living in a mill village during the Great Depression.

1933 Viola Pharis, "On my way to the Pelzer game, I stopped at the company store and bought a penny stick of peppermint. As best I could, I broke it into three equal pieces for my little brothers. Mama died four years ago when I was eleven, and I have been their mother ever since, but nobody's mine.

Contest editorial review: "Very strong sense of place and time, first person voice of the narrator very vibrant and believable. Conjures realistic and approachable southern dialect, and the characters are magnetic.

Burris is a member of The South Carolina Writers Workshop and spends his time writing southern- gothic (Southern Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.) Burris is also the

author of I Wish I Was

Hosey Hitchcock.