by Terry Piper Ozark Series, vol. 3 Readers first met Charlene Ridley and the colorful cast of characters, who were part of her life, as she was about to start school in Boogey Flats, Missouri. OZARK GIRL told the story of a young girl growing up in poverty with an alcoholic father and learning to cope, not always successfully, with middle-school bullies. In GETTING SMART, Charlene was a teenager who had learned to cope with bullies and had begun to carve a place for herself in the social landscape that was Boogey Flats High School. We followed her as she came to terms with boys, dating, and the love-triangles that sometimes cause rifts in friendship. In OZARK WOMAN, Charlene finishes high school and heads off to college. The culture of the 1960s, as it was lived in the Ozarks, comes alive through Charlene's eyes in this final book of the trilogy. The Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, the Beatles, the pill - they all had an impact on Charlene and the decisions that would affect the rest of her life. ISBN 1-59431-815-8 Women's Contemporary Fiction, Mainstream Fiction