I don't remember Mama crying when Granny Ruth died, but the day after she was buried, Mama gathered together all the pillows in the house and went into the room where her mother's foot-pedaled sewing machine stood silent. Taking a pair of black-handled scissors, she cut open the tops of Granny's pillows. Aunt Blanche asked Mama what in Jehoshaphat's name did she think she was doing, cutting up all the pillows like that. Mama answered something about finding a crown inside one of those pillows Granny Ruth had fashioned from chicken feathers.

"Sometimes," she explained, "when a person sleeps on a pillow for a long time the feathers will mold together to make a crown ..."

It's the 1960s and nine-year-old Karen Spears is living in a trailer in middle Georgia. Her father, David Spears, was killed in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, and left behind three young children and a wife with a ninth-grade education. Hero Mamais the gritty, searing, and beautifully written story of what happened to this Southern family in the aftermath of a soldier's death.

At first the widow Spears appeared to fall apart — turning herself into a beer-guzzling, good-time girl, while her children responded in kind. Eventually she recognized how much her children needed her and, with mule-headed tenacity, she earned her nursing degree and bought the family a real home fashioned from bricks, rising above her own flaws to forge a better life for her kids. Now Karen Spears Zacharias pays tribute to this woman of guts and determination — her Hero Mama — who battled overwhelming adversity to pull her family up and make them proud of her, and of themselves.

Hero Mamais also the story of the South, where a young girl grew up against an emotionally charged landscape of racism and bigotry, where the daughter of a fallen soldier had to face the stigma of a war nobody wanted, and where a family in crisis pulled together to achieve its own version of the American dream. It is a triumphant tale of reconciliation between a daughter and her father, a daughter and her nation, and a daughter and the people of Vietnam. It is a story for any daughter who has loved her father — and for any daughter who has had to discover how deeply her mother really loves her.

"In December 1965, David Spears said good-bye to his wife and three children and went to fight in Vietnam; he returned 'in a cargo plane full of caskets' in July 1966. His family has never been the same. 'He was the center of what made me feel safe,' Zacharias, then in third grade, explains. Her mother cried nonstop and never spoke of her beloved again. There wasn't much time for grief, anyway. Spears's paltry life insurance money was soon gone, and Zacharias's mother was a high school dropout living in a cramped trailer home in Tennessee with three kids. She put herself through nursing school while working and raising those youngsters. Although Zacharias's brother struggled with drugs and the teenage Zacharias had to have an abortion before realizing getting pregnant wasn't the best way to find reliable love, they all turned out fine eventually. Readers may enjoy Zacharias's mom's trailer park smarts (a woman's best protection is 'a good padded bra') and her colorful Southern-isms (her hungover brother was 'sicker than a yard dog with scours'). But while Zacharias entertains, her main point — that a soldier's death brings pain and sorrow to many generations of his family — is a sad truth that Americans are beginning to relearn. Photos. Agent, Carole Bidnick. (On sale Jan. 18)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Karen Spears Zacharias's work has won dozens of writing awards. She has lectured at numerous Vietnam veterans' events; serves on the national advisory board of the Virtual Wall and the Orphans of War Foundation; is a contributing columnist for The Veteran, the magazine for the Vietnam Veterans of America; and is a member of Sons and Daughters in Touch, a national organization for adult children of servicemen killed in Vietnam. She lives in Oregon and Georgia.