Beneath a Thousand Apple Trees
by Janie
DeVos
GENRE: Fiction
BLURB:
As the 20th century
dawns, the world is transformed in dizzying ways. But nestled in North
Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains is a place, and a family, out of time—where one
young girl will grow to face the challenges of each generation before her—and
discover whether she has the strength to overcome them…
The eldest surviving
daughter of Anna Guinn, Rachel rarely ventures far from her home in the
Appalachians, aside from an occasional trip into town to trade a penny for a
peppermint stick. Sometimes she yearns for more, but as much as she fears her
mother’s unstable mind, she is anchored by the strength of her grandmother,
Willa. Freed from an abusive marriage, Willa holds the family together through
hardship, all the while fulfilling her role as keeper of her neighbors’
carefully guarded secrets—the most painful of which may be her own.
In this isolated,
eccentric world where people depend on moonshine to put food on the table, hang
talismans to chase away ghosts—and tragedy can strike as suddenly as a coiled
copperhead—Rachel wonders what life has in store. Most of all, she worries
whether she and her sister have inherited the darkness that lurks inside their
mother. Her one respite is the town’s apple orchard, the ally she finds
there—and the revelation that she can take her destiny into her own hands,
decide what to leave behind—and what is truly worth carrying into the future…
Excerpt:
I wasn’t born with a bad right foot.
Instead, I’d been dealt a bad hand when an accident at Papa’s timber mill
crippled me. The man known as the off-bearer was busy stacking boards that had
just been cut by the spinning, sharp-toothed saw and didn’t see me walk up
beside him. With his mind a million miles away, he was simply repeating the
tedious pulling-off-and-stacking motion of yet another board when he turned and
dropped it on my foot.
It seemed to happen in slow motion.
The off-bearer, who was a stoic Irishman named Rusty Flaherty, saw me standing
there just a fraction of a second after he’d let the board go, and the look of
horror on his face was one I would never forget, and which froze me in place. I
was lucky, they said, because it had narrowly missed my head. But I wasn’t
lucky enough, for even though Papa immediately threw me in the wagon and hauled
me over to Doc Pardie’s house, my foot had never healed right.
The doctor wouldn’t operate because
I was only four and “still had growin’ to do, and there ain’t any use but to
wait ’til she’s done a-doin’ it,” he’d told my father. I heard Papa tell Mama
later that he wouldn’t have let Doc do it anyway, since he smelled like he’d
“dived into a bottle of one hundred proof. Maybe it’ll just straighten out on
its own,” he’d said, without too much conviction in his voice. And it had
healed, just not straight enough or strong enough, and there’d never been
enough money to do anything to correct it.
AUTHOR BIO:
Janie
DeVos is
a native of Coral Gables, Florida. She attended Florida State University, then
worked in the advertising industry for over a decade, including radio, cable
television, public relations and advertising firms. Though her career changed
over the years, one thing didn’t—her love of writing. She is an award winning
children's author. Beneath a Thousand Apple Trees is her adult
debut. Learn more at janiedevos.com.
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