"A mother and daughter in Appalachia unpack the traumas of the past in a powerful and reflective novel about family, healing, and moving on by the author of A Woman in Time.
Jenny Caudill grows up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a home that feels more like a trap. Shy, ignored by boys, and wearing her sisters’ hand-me-downs, Jenny spends her time lost in the promises of romantic pop songs and daydreaming in the back seat of her daddy’s junked Bel Air. There’s got to be more to life.
When she catches the eye of the older Rob Lewis, a dangerous relationship begins. Her mother’s warnings go ignored. After a brush with death and an impulsive marriage in Tennessee, Jenny becomes a mother herself. But her love story is far from the one she envisioned. Trading one trap for another darker one, she is stuck between trying to avoid her husband’s violent moods and taking an unknown risk by grabbing her children, running, and trying to find a way forward.
As Jenny’s daughter, Charlie, comes of age, she strives to understand the choices her mother made, to confront the traumas that shaped both their lives, and to overcome any limits the forces of the past have imposed."
"A woman challenges the constraints of life in Prohibition-era Appalachia in this sweeping and richly rewarding novel about endurance, survival, and redemption.
The McKenzie women, empowered with a formidable history rooted in the foothills of Appalachia, have passed down their folk-healing wisdom through generations. Rosalee, the last living headstrong daughter in Granny McKenzie’s line, soaked up everything she could about the secrets of the forest before a series of tragedies left her alone, without the protection of the women who came before her.
The close-knit ties of Rosalee’s childhood are long gone. Now, at her eastern Kentucky farm, she bears a marriage with a volatile bootlegger. She struggles with the demands of motherhood. And her independence is relegated to its “proper place”: under the thumb of men. Her optimism dimming, Rosalee finds solace in the Kentucky woods, a space that holds secret powers of protection from a life Rosalee can no longer control. To the graves of her female ancestors, beside the waters of an enchanting spring, Rosalee returns time and again to consider her future—and discovers a mysterious connection to her past.
As Rosalee wrestles with her isolation, with being a wife in an increasingly dangerous marriage, and with being a woman of her time, she must draw on her strength and resilience to survive—and to protect—on her own terms."
