The Moonshiner's Daughter
A Southern Coming-of-Age Saga of Family and Loyalty
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4.3 • 318 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel!
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everhart's rousing fourth novel (after The Giving Kind) follows 16-year-old Jessie Sasser's struggle to reckon with her family's moonshining in 1960s North Carolina. Jessie blames her father, Easton, for her mother's death in a distilling accident, which she vividly remembers witnessing when she was four, but Easton refuses to discuss it. Jessie's sense of inferiority at school and around town pits her against Easton and her younger brother, Merritt, both of whom are proud of their outlaw identity. Her isolation and anger drive her into bulimia, while her sole friendship, with a classmate named Aubrey, turns sour after Aubrey takes a shine to Willie Murry, whose unscrupulous family runs a rival distillery. After Jessie confides to Aubrey about her plan to destroy her family's operation, Aubrey warns Willie that his own family will receive the blame. Aubrey's betrayal unleashes a chain of events that pushes Jessie into trying her hand at the stills. Everhart movingly explores Jessie's struggle with her eating disorder, viscerally describing her twin desires for nourishment and purging in relation to a deep need to define herself: "It happened when there came this need to fill what was barren, satisfy a void that belonged not to regular hunger, but to something else." Everhart's story of self-discovery, rife with colorful characters and a satisfying twist, will thrill readers.
Customer Reviews
Keeps you on your toes
As each chapter ended, I was left wanting to keep reading on and on. A great story with unexpected twists. Would love to see this as a movie someday!
Authentic
Excellent and authentic portrayal of those who suffer from eating disorders
Great Read
Was cheerful all the way through - for such a traumatically dramatic story. The characters resonated all the way through - probably because I’m from the south and I’ve seen similar pictures of family members depicted in many of the same ways this story tells tale of. If it weren’t for work and school - I might’ve finished this reading in one sitting. I tried. Thank you, to the author, for the epilogue.