Winner-Kentucky Novel of the Year 2003 Winner-Award for Special Achievement from Fellowship of Southern Writers Nominee-Southern Book Critics Circle Prize Nominee-BookSense Book of the Year (longlist) "So it is that Vine Cherokee-born and raised in the early 1900s trains her eye on a young white man forsaking her family and their homeland to settle in with Saul's people: his smart-as-a-whip slow-to-love mother Esme; his brother Aaron a gifted banjo player hot tempered and unpredictable; and Aaron's flightly and chattery Melungeon wife Aidia." It's a delicate negotiation into this new family and culture one that Vine's mother had predicted would not go smoothly. But it's worse than she could have imagined. Vine is viewed as an outsider by the townspeople. Aaron she slowly realizes is strangely fixated on her. But what is at first difficult becomes a test of her spirit. And in the violent turn of events that ensues she learns what it means to forgive others and most important how to forgive herself.
