If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel! 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.

Moonshiner's Daughter is the early life story of a young girl raised in the some of the most remote, backwoods parts of Haywood County, North Carolina, deep in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Mary Judith Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper near Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to live with her older sister who had run away from a forced marriage. The memoir Moonshiner's Daughter is told through the eyes and words of a barely educated child and teenager yet their meaning and descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. She changed the names of most people and places to protect her still living family members. Authors Robert Morgan & Ron Rash give recommendations.

A young woman in 1960's North Carolina resents the moonshining operation her family has conducted for generations, blaming it for her mother's death. When her father insists that moonshining is in her veins, Jessie devises a plan to destroy the stills. Her scheme escalates an old rivalry and revels long-held grudges.

Twelve-year-old Tom Higgins is learning the craft of making whiskey. Even though Prohibition forbids the production and sale of alcoholic beverages, Tom is determined to be a good apprentice. He is, after all, a moonshiner's son. His father has raised moonshining to an art, and Tom wants nothing more than to please this rough, distant man. Then a preacher comes to the wilds of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains to rid Bad Camp Hollow of the "evils of liquor." This is when Tom and his father begin their campaign to match wits with the preacher and try to outsmart the law officers he calls in. Tom's father is eloquent in defense of a way of life long and respectfully lived by the Higgins family. But the preacher and his pretty daughter make a powerful case against it. And when drink causes a tragedy in the community, Tom Higgins is torn....

A fantasy involving a fisherman's daughter, a dog, and a little boy.

A half-breed and a white man. For years their legend has grown, but few know how far they will go for one another or the roots of their blood bond. Now, that bond will be put to the most deadly test yet. . . When Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves came to Kansas, they didn't know the Governor had just made the state liquor-free. But it doesn't take Matt long to find a place to drink and a family of enterprising moonshiners with one stunningly beautiful daughter. Trouble is, while Matt is falling hard, Sam is being recruited by a sheriff who happens to have a lovely daughter of his own. . . What happens when you mix 200-proof corn liquor with intoxicating women and two friends on opposite sides of the law? Big trouble. And more is coming: bearing down on the town of Cottonwood is a murderous bootlegger, hired gunmen and a gambler with a plan of his own. As a killing storm crashes over Cottonwood, the odds favor the man who is stone cold sober, good with a red hot gun--and backed by unbreakable bonds of blood. . .