Mothering on Perilous

After losing her mother, Cecelia Loring arrives in the Kentucky mountains hollow with grief, seeking work at a remote settlement school. What she finds there is not the solitude she expected, but a houseful of boys who keep running away, driven home by homesickness and loyalty to families locked in an ancient feud over a piece of land. Nucky, the most stubborn of them, carries the weight of watching over his brother Blant, who stands sentinel against the Cheevers while the Marrses hold their ground. Cecelia must coax these fractured children into staying, even as she wonders whether she has anything left to give. But in the tending of a garden and the quiet work of coaxing troubled boys to trust, something begins to mend in her own broken places. Lucy Furman, drawing on her real years as housemother at the Hindman Settlement School, renders Appalachian mountain life with granular tenderness and unsentimental warmth. This is a novel about how caring for others can rebuild what grief has torn down, and how sometimes the ones who need saving save us right back.