Ralph Granger's Fortunes

In the blood-soaked hills of the Appalachian frontier, fifteen-year-old Ralph Granger faces an impossible choice: satisfy his grandfather's thirst for vengeance against the Vaughn family, or refuse and lose everything. When Ralph refuses to kill the son of his father's murderer, he chooses morality over blood loyalty, and is cast out from everything he's known. What follows is a boy's brutal, exhilarating journey from the mountains to the lowlands, from boyhood into something harder to name. Brown writes with spare, muscular prose about the weight of inherited rage and the terrifying freedom of choosing your own path. This is a story about what it costs to break a cycle of violence, and whether starting over is possible when the past follows close behind. For readers who love frontier fiction and stories of young people forced to grow up too fast.