Morning Book Chat
This month's selection is When the Jessamine Grows by Donna Everhart. An evocative, morally complex novel set in rural 19th century North Carolina, as one woman fights to keep her family united, her farm running, and her convictions whole during the most devastating and divisive period in American history.
Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. Her family does not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, believing this is simply not their fight. When her fifteen-year-old son Henry, impressed by his grandfather’s stories of the glories of war, runs off to volunteer, Joetta frantically insists her husband Ennis go and search for him and bring him home. Weeks pass with no word from her husband or son and Joetta is battered by the strain of running the farm with so little help. As the country becomes further entangled in the ramifications of war, Joletta finds herself increasingly at odds with those around her-until one act of kindness brings her family to the edge of even greater disaster.