In the mist-shrouded coves of the Cumberland Mountains, a young woman named June Sterling climbs to witness the smoke of the outside world rising over the ridges, a sign of progress creeping toward her isolated home. When she encounters John Hale, a stranger fishing in the stream below, the encounter crackles with the tension of two worlds colliding. He represents everything threatening her mountain life: modernization, the law, the cultivated world below. Yet neither can deny the current that pulls them together. Their budding connection must navigate the deadly Thornwood feud, her protective father Judd, and a community suspicious of outsiders. Fox writes with lush appreciation for Appalachian beauty, the waterfalls, the laurel thickets, the blue mists, but doesn't shy from the poverty and violence that define life in the coves. This is romantic adventure at its early twentieth-century best: sweeping, emotional, and utterlytransporting. The book that made John Fox Jr. famous still enchants readers who crave stories of star-crossed lovers against dramatic landscapes.
