The Power and the Glory

Johnnie Consadine has never known anything but the thin air and lean years of a mountain cabin, where her sick mother and weary Uncle Pros have stretched every meal to breaking point. When the opportunity arise to walk down from those hills to Cottonville and take a position at the cotton mill, she goes not for herself but for them. What she finds in that roaring factory town is both more harsh and more luminous than she imagined: long hours, strict overseers, and the particular loneliness of being a stranger among strangers who speak a different rhythm of life. Yet she also finds something else, something that complicates the simple story she told herself about duty and sacrifice. This is a novel about the cost of ambition when the ambition belongs to someone with almost nothing, and about what a young woman discovers about power when she tries to claim it for her own. MacGowan Cooke writes with unsentimental tenderness about the particular vulnerabilities of working women in early industrial America, and Johnnie remains a quietly radical figure: not a victim, not a heroine in the usual sense, but a person learning to want things and to strategize about how to get them.