Phoebe is on the road with two of her younger siblings, looking for a place for her family to move. She has no money, not much education, but a wealth of love for her family, determination, and ingenuity. Where some see trash, she sees opportunity. She is one of my favorite characters, and one of the most memorable.
Readers may want to know ahead of time that the main female character, Phoebe Hawley, has a manner of speaking that is very different from what they are used to hearing. Some may even think it is uneducated. I come from Alabama myself, and my grandmother, born in the 1890's, spoke in a similar manner.
I read a lot of romance, and don't remember reading any overly explicit scenes, as some reviews have mentioned. I recommend this book highly, for Phoebe, and how she persevered and never gave up. The romance took a while to develop, and there was a good bit of conflict. Gage was kind of a jerk at first, partly due to his ex-wife, but Phoebe brought him around.
I'm including the author's back story for Phoebe and her family's origin. It is fascinating, and I wish I had known this ahead of time. It can also be found below the Editorial Reviews.
From the author: "As a rule, major characters in every novel have a back story. Back stories are essential to a character's personality. It defines how they think, move, speak, and interact with other characters before they ever step on page. Back stories seldom find their way into a simple romance novel because they slow the pace of the story. In truth, a back story is only essential for character development. Yet, back stories are the very essence of a character. Here is Phoebe Hawley's back story.
Phoebe's ancestors migrated and set up tiny secluded homesteads deep within the Okefenokee Swamp and Suwannee River basin in Georgia and North Florida. Her people came from England--many were runaway indentured servants from the colony General Oglethorpe brought to Georgia. For more than two hundred years, her ancestors existed as a secluded tribe of swamp people. They were the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in America, and their speech, undiluted by contact with modern America for more than two hundred years, was Chaucer's; Elizabethan. The swamp settlers were wild, wary, witty, fiercely independent, and shrewd. They hunted and trapped every wild creature from deer, bear, and wild boar to feed and clothe themselves. They fished, grew their own food and herbs, spun their own cotton, tanned leather for shoes, and carved canoes to navigate the swamp. They didn't hold with government and laws that poached on independence and pride. Excursions to the outside world were few and only to sell alligator hides and trade that cash for sugar, flour, salt, kerosene, and perhaps a bolt of sturdy denim or sewing needles.
Isolated deep within the Okefenokee, two-hundred years of progress, wars, and the Great Depression passed them by until 1942, when Roosevelt, gearing up for war and needing wood from the massive swamp forests of cypress and pine, forced the people out.
The people didn't go far, only to the saw mills at the edge of the swamp and when the saw mills closed, they went to work in the paper mills; when the paper mills along the coasts of Florida and Georgia 'dragged up', they migrated into mill towns. And here, for the first time, the former swamp women came into their own. They put away their spinning wheels, their quilt-making, their cast-iron soap-making pots and went to work in cotton mills spinning thread and filling bobbins. Years went by. Then cotton mills across the South began to close and the people began to migrate once again. Living as 'outlanders' had acclimated them to 'Ameriky' and most had lost much of the Elizabethan dialect, but the rhythm of the language hummed on, as did their elemental code of independence and moral rightness. If anything, six generations of living as outlanders had sharpened their intelligence, hardened their pride and increased their independent spirit. Yet, one thing never changed--when practical choice allows the privilege, the descendants of those early swamp settlers gravitate to land and water.
Which is why Phoebe Hawley, an out-of-work-mill girl, six generations removed from the Okefenokee Swamp, and on a mission to find her family a home, aims her old truck South--toward the coast and finds exactly the right place in the tiny fishing village of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, where a half-dozen great and small rivers and canals flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Phoebe recognizes G.G. Morgan's kissing lips, but is more impressed with the calluses on his hands--a working man's hands. Moreover, she is instantly enamored of G. G. Morgan's land, long before she's enamored of the man himself."
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Popular Highlights in this book
“Not yet,” Phoebe said, brushing off the fact that the interviewer had insulted her down to muscle and bone. “I didn’t want that old job nohow. Dern it, Maydean. I told you not to mess with that mirror, didn’t I?”Highlighted by 150 Kindle readers- For an instant Phoebe closed her eyes against the bright glare of the sun. Pride and anger warred within her.Highlighted by 120 Kindle readers
- Twelve-year-old Maydean flounced. It took her whole body to do it. “How much money we got left, Phoebe? I’m hungry.”Highlighted by 116 Kindle readers
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Top reviews from other countries
Susan's Reviews
Phoebe just cracked me upand I laughed and laughed at her well-meaning antics! Get this one!
Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2021
Perkins
A sensitively written Tae, beautifully told
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2021