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Summary
Summary
"A rollicking tale." -- The Washington Post *"Propulsive." --Associated Press * "Wild, smart, energetic." -- Los Angeles Times * "Brilliant and effervescent." --NPR
From the #1 bestselling author of The Glass Castle , the instant New York Times bestseller a "rip-roaring, action-packed" ( The New York Times ) novel about an indomitable young woman in prohibition-era Virginia.
Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father's daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother's son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.
Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That's a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.
"You'll fall in love with Sallie on the very first page and keep rooting for her all the way through to the last" ( Good Housekeeping ) in this thrilling read that "goes down easy...like the forbidden whisky that defines the life of Sallie Kincaid" (Associated Press).
Author Notes
Jeannette Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle , has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses , which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review . Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Walls's breathtaking latest (after The Silver Star) traces the trajectory of two feuding Virginia families and a woman who rises to the top of a bootlegging empire. For more than 50 years, bad blood has permeated relations between the bootlegging Kincaid family and the Bond brothers, starting with the Kincaids' questionable acquisition of 88 acres from the Bonds. Sallie Kincaid's enigmatic father, "the Duke," controls an Emporium general store, warehouse, lumber mill, hauling company, and rental properties, and after a string of unexpected deaths in the family, Sallie takes charge of the family business during the Prohibition years. As "Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners," Sally comes to oversee a profitable business that amplifies the backwoods dispute into a full-fledged violent war with the Bonds, who avenge the Kincaids' land grab with a calamitous act of escalation, entangling both families and exposing scandalous secrets. The thrilling plot culminates in bombshell revelations and massive conflagrations, and through it all Sallie makes for an indelible heroine as she fights for her life and livelihood. This is a stunner. Agent: Margaret Riley King and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
Historical fiction concerning the intricate battles over succession within the family that controls a poor rural county in post--World War I Virginia. Duke Kincaid owns most of Claiborne County, both financially and politically. A charming, ruthless autocrat, feared yet beloved, he has three acknowledged children by three different wives (not to mention unacknowledged offspring). Shortly after his fourth marriage, the Duke dies unexpectedly. Although pragmatic, street-smart middle child Sallie is his intellectual and emotional heir, the Duke leaves his estate to her emotionally oversensitive half brother, Eddie, because he's the only boy. Seventeen-year-old Sallie is devoted to Eddie, who's 13, but after he commits suicide she's torn by conflicting loyalties to her weak but lovable stepmother; her father's scheming but able sister; and her older half sister, Mary, who's next in line to inherit the Kincaid empire but has not lived in Claiborne Country since her parents divorced. Family intrigue plays out against the backdrop of 1920s Claiborne County, where racism is a given, Prohibition is the law, and bootlegging is the main source of income for Blacks and Whites. Staunch prohibitionist Mary goes to war against the bootleggers using an enforcer who employs extreme violence. Sallie wants to support her sister but sympathizes with the bootleggers--her neighbors and tenants--and recognizes that the family's finances depend on trading whiskey. Defining what is moral becomes complicated for Sallie. So does defining family. Tough and independent, Sallie refuses to let womanhood limit her ambitions as she earns the nickname Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners. History buffs will enjoy the many hints Walls sprinkles to show that Tudor England is her novel's template (the Duke's marriage to his brother's widow; his banished daughter, Mary, and short-lived heir, Edward; the Kincaids' counselor Cecil, etc.). Television buffs will smile at the Kincaids' resemblance to the Roys of Succession. A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Sallie Kincaid, whose mother died under hushed-up circumstances, longs for approval from the Duke, her wealthy, iron-fisted father. But he has remarried and now has a hoped-for son, which leads to the banishment of exuberant daredevil Sallie, who wants to be "the fastest girl in the world." Exiled to poverty with her disgraced Aunt Faye, Sallie is finally summoned back to the Kincaids' plush Virginia home at age 18. Her stepmother has died and her father, about to marry for the fourth time, wants Sallie to toughen up her bookish half-brother, but she's more interested in the Duke's many-pronged Prohibition-bucking business empire. Sallie loves nothing better than driving at top speeds--not even Tom, who teaches her to drive and wants to marry her--and she soon becomes key to the Kincaids' bootlegging operation. Walls' third novel races along with Sallie at the wheel in a barreling tale of perpetual and baroque family melodrama, dynastic struggles, suspenseful showdowns, and all-out warfare. Drawing once again on family history, Walls has created a magnetic, irreverent dynamo in Sallie, whose transporting narration is incandescent with incisive observations, moral dilemmas, and startlingly gorgeous descriptions. With courage, backbone, and wit, Sallie navigates painful disclosures, fierce opposition, and tragic disasters, all while protesting the unending injustices inflicted on women. With its fireworks illumination of the bootlegging world and irresistible characters, Hang the Moon is vital, provocative, and intoxicating.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Walls has been a draw ever since her indelible memoir, The Glass Castle (2005), and this house-on-fire novel will accrue many requests.
Library Journal Review
Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial--ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift--he sees shifting islands no one else can--who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women--15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian émigré studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II--like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).
