When financial ruin drives Clayton back from Germany to his family's mineral land in the Kentucky mountains, he expects hardship, not transformation. But the Cumberland Range reshapes everything: its isolation, its fierce beauty, and most unexpectedly, a young woman named Easter Hicks who rides bulls like other mountaineers ride horses and speaks with a directness that Startles every convention. Easter lives on Wolf Mountain with her mother, her absent father whispered about in connection to moonshine violence, and she needs no one. Yet something forms between this educated outsider and this undomesticated mountain girl, a connection that stirs duty in Clayton, suspicion in the community, and a love that defies the boundaries between their worlds. John Fox Jr. captures Appalachian mountain life at a crossroads, when railroads and industry begin to press against old ways, and tells a romance that feels startlingly modern in its insistence that love requires becoming someone new.
