Donna Everhart Bücher

Rumors of an impending war spread throughout North Carolina, as the North and South find themselves in an irreconcilable conflict. Joetta McBride and her husband Ennis live a modest but content life on their small self-sufficient farm, raising their two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry and eleven-year-old Robert. They do not support the Confederacy's stance on slavery, viewing their family as neutral and believing the looming conflict does not concern them. This belief is a source of contention, even with Joetta's father-in-law, who recounts tales of heroic battles to the boys, eventually prompting Henry to run away to war one night. In a desperate plea, Joetta urges Ennis to bring him home. Weeks pass without news from either father or son, leaving Joetta to shoulder the burden of the farm. As the land is engulfed in war, she decides to open her home and farm to soldiers from both sides, leading to increasing conflicts with her community. One good deed nearly brings her family to ruin, yet Joetta remains steadfast in her principles, believing that they will survive the greatest trials yet to come in a divided nation.

In the 1940s Carolinas, a young woman's journey unfolds against a backdrop of harsh landscapes and even harsher emotional challenges. As she navigates feelings of jealousy and betrayal, the bonds of her family are tested, pushing her from innocence towards wisdom. The story explores the complexities of familial relationships and the impact of personal struggles on unity, highlighting how internal conflicts can be as destructive as external hardships.

Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner's Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family's past ... Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser's daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she's concerned, moonshine caused her mother's death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth--one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school's gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the monster inside Jessie. Resenting her father's insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie's loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths--and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for

In Georgia's Swallow Hill turpentine camp in 1932, Rae Lynn Cobb, disguised as a man, hides out from those who would wrongly accuse her for murdering her husband and struggles to survive harsh, brutal conditions with the help of two individuals with their own tragic pasts