The Moonshiner’s Daughter by Donna Everhart #bookreview @KensingtonBooks @wordstogobuy

Provocative, emotional, & compelling!

THE MOONSHINER’S DAUGHTER by DONNA EVERHART is an engaging, fascinating, gritty, heart-wrenching, and soul-stirring southern historical fiction novel that was such a fabulous, compassionate, and heartfelt story. I was immediately sucked into the storyline and it gripped me right until the very end.

I absolutely love these types of gritty southern fiction tales and absolutely loved that this story was centered around moonshining. I’ve always had this fascination for the history of the making and running of moonshine and this definitely fulfilled my curiosity. Along with the moonshining there is some tough themes discussed here within this novel. Very early on we are privy to our main character here, Jessie having an eating disorder. We are given a firsthand look into how she struggles with her appearance and how that ultimately affects her self-esteem. DONNA EVERHART explores and delivers this subject-matter with tender loving care. Jessie and her journey totally consumed my thoughts and my heart, her story definitely resonated with me deeply on a personal level.

DONNA EVERHART delivers a steadily-paced, well-researched, and a beautifully written story here that remarkably captures the essence, time, and place perfectly. I felt like I was experiencing everything in this novel right along with these believable and exceptionally well-drawn characters. This novel deeply affected and touched my heart. It is one that I soon won’t forget.

Norma’s Stats:
Cover: Eye-catching, lovely, vintage, and an extremely fitting representation to storyline. I absolutely love this cover and it definitely enticed me in reading this book.
Title: An intriguing, relevant, effective, and fitting representation to storyline. I absolutely love this title!
Writing/Prose: Easy to read, eloquent, entertaining, vivid, palpable, engaging and captivating.
Plot: Gritty, stirring, heart-felt, memorable, atmospheric, plausible, interesting, steadily-paced, and entertaining.
Ending: A bittersweet, heart-felt, moving, and satisfying ending.
Overall: 4.5 Stars! I have such a deep affection for this story and highly recommend it!

Thank you so much to NetGalley, Donna Everhart and Kensington Books for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.

About the book from Goodreads

Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner’s Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family’s past . . .

Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser’s daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she’s concerned, moonshine caused her mother’s death a dozen years ago.

Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth—one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school’s gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the “monster” inside Jessie.

Resenting her father’s insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie’s loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths—and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for.