Where the Crawdads Sing meets The Four Winds as award-winning author Donna Everhart immerses readers in a unique setting-a turpentine camp buried deep in the vast pine forests of Georgia during the Great Depression-for a captivating story of friendship, survival, and three vagabonds' intersecting lives...
During the Great Depression, wretched labor camps crop up in remote areas of the expansive pine forests throughout the American South. Destitute workers live and toil under terrible conditions to harvest pine gum, hacking into tree trunks, drawing out the sticky sap that gives the Tar Heel State its nickname, and hauling it to stills to be refined into turpentine. Trapped in these isolated locations, workers are entirely dependent on the often greedy, abusive camp owners who provide food and housing at grossly inflated prices. Subsistence living means racking huge debts they are forced to work off, creating an endless cycle of labor and debt. But for the most desperate among America's vast unemployed, these camps are often the last and only option.
This much is true for three individuals whose lives intersect in the deep woods of Georgia at the Swallow Hill turpentine camp in 1932. For Rae Lynn Cobb, a young woman disguised as a man, Swallow Hill offers distance and anonymity from those who would wrongly imprison her for killing her kind though careless husband. For a charming bachelor named Del Reese, it's a place where backbreaking work might drown out memories of a recent trauma that's shaken him to his core.
But Swallow Hill is no easy haven. The squalid camp is ruled by a sadistic boss named Crow and the greedy commissary owner Otis Riddle, a man who takes out his frustrations on his browbeaten wife, Cornelia. Del and "Ray Cobb" are physically and emotionally tested as they struggle to survive harsh, brutal conditions under the ever watchful, narrow-minded Crow. As Rae Lynn forges a deeper friendship with both Del and Cornelia, she begins to envision a path out of the camp. But she will have to come to terms with her past, with all its pain and beauty, before she can open herself to a new life and seize the chance to begin again...
