BOOK TITLE: Winter's Reckoning
AUTHOR: Adele Holmes
Author Bio:
Adele graduated from medical school in 1993. She lives in central Arkansas with her husband, Chris Holmes.
Their fun-loving family includes a rollicking crew of two adult children and their spouses, five grandchildren of diverse ages and talents, a horse, and a Bernedoodle.
The joy of twenty plus years in private practice pediatrics was interrupted only due to an unquenchable desire to wander the world and give back to the community—in an effort to help make the world a better place. Today, Adele is actively involved in the Interfaith Center in Arkansas, Little Rock Second Presbyterian Church, and the Celebrate! Maya Project, an organization that promotes Maya Angelou’s advocacy through humanities and the arts.
Social Justice is her passion.
Since 2016 Adele has entrenched herself in the world of writing. On August 9, 2022 her debut novel Winter’s Reckoning, a southern gothic, will be published. A second has been started.
Book Blurb:
Forty-six-year-old Madeline Fairbanks has no use for ideas like “separation of the races” or “men as the superior sex.” There are many in her dying Southern Appalachian town who are upset by her socially progressive views, but for years—partly due to her late husband’s still-powerful influence, and partly due to her skill as a healer in a remote town with no doctor of its own—folks have been willing to turn a blind eye to her “transgressions.” Even Maddie’s decision to take on a Black apprentice, Ren Morgan, goes largely unchallenged by her white neighbors, though it’s certainly grumbled about. But when a charismatic and power-hungry new reverend blows into town in 1917 and begins to preach about the importance of racial segregation, the long-idle local KKK chapter fires back into action—and places Maddie and her friends in Jamesville’s Black community squarely in their sights. Maddie had better stop intermingling with Black folks, discontinue her herbalistic “witchcraft,” and leave town immediately, they threaten, or they’ll lynch Ren’s father, Daniel. Faced with this decision, Maddie is terrified . . . and torn. Will she bow to their demands and walk away—or will she fight to keep the home she’s built in Jamestown and protect the future of the people she loves, both Black and white?
Book Buy Link: https://amzn.to/33TvwuM
Editorial Review:
Today she’d learned that you can’t always follow your heart. Sometimes you have to give up a piece of yourself by following rules you don’t like, if that’s what’s best for someone else. But you should never stop trying to change those wrong rules.
Tear out a page of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, add in a mix of Deliverance and The Apostle, along with a dash of Nell... and you have yourself a die-hard Appalachian story set so far back in the woods and so backwards in their thinking, that Madeline Fairbanks, the local healer, must find an inner strength to fight the racial and misogynistic prejudice permeating the town.
Between the layers of characters weaving through this story, the reader is given a rare glimpse into the minds of these mountain people, all who view themselves as superior in so many ways – the white community, the KKK – while Maddie, a Northern transplant from Boston, and her Black assistant, Ren Morgan, look beyond the color of skin to doctor the people both physically, emotionally, and sometimes, spiritually. But Maddie hides a secret, a secret kept in a leather box in her room, of all the healing recipes and stories of her ancestors as far back as the old country. She questions her own abilities to heal, relying more on the concoctions than any innate spiritual connection since not being able to save someone very dear to her. Yet, she can teach, and she sets about teaching the ways of healing to her granddaughter, Hannah, whose Alice-in-Wonderland imagination and desire to learn the craft draws the two of them together in a most special bond. Not to mention, Hannah watches everything; a little fly on the wall as she learns from her grandmother about looking beyond color and treating people as equals.
Hannah was a very in-depth character and the sections in the book which switched to her POV came alive in unexpected ways – like seeing the world through youthful eyes – and attached me to her right from the get-go.
Ren Morgan is a different kettle of fish. Her friendship to Maddie reminded me so much of Ada and Ruby in Cold Mountain, or maybe a combination of Ruby with Celie from The Color Purple. Ren’s attachment to Maddie is not as grounded as Maddie hopes, especially when a new preacher breezes into town – the narcissistic, arrogant white man who loves his horse, supports the Jim Crow laws from the pulpit, and hides his white KKK robes in the closet as he seduces Ren... a black girl. What is his ultimate goal? Power and control over the town, over Maddie’s headstrong ways, and satiating his own lusts on Ren completely uncaring of the consequences.
Even the horses wore white garments with masks, but no pointed tops. Guess the horses are smarter. They don’t have to wear the dunce caps.
And the consequences of this man’s actions are vast. All Maddie desires to do is help the poor mountain people of her town with their illnesses or birthing their babies... but Reverend Carl Howard (called “Coward” by Hannah) in his quest for power seeks to displace these women who are in his way towards his goal. Little by little, his influence over Ren causes a rift between the two friends.
And then, a winter’s reckoning sweeps across the mountains – icy, cold, chest-high snow drifts which isolate people for weeks on end. Maddie discovers her granddaughter near frozen to death in the storm, her head gashed open by some wild thing in the woods. Enter the “Deliverance” character into the story, one referred to throughout, but whose presence haunts the town, yet he manages to bring Maddie, Ren, and Hannah together as they fight for survival in a lone log cabin surrounded by snow. For a while, the three women are protected from the wheedling of the preacher, from the clicking tongues of the townspeople who think whites and blacks should not mingle, as Ren and Maddie restore Hannah’s health using their doctoring ways. But as the snow starts to melt, and as secrets are revealed, Maddie takes her husband’s Winchester and does an unspeakable thing – all for protection; and yet, quite unsure if she did the right thing.
The midmorning sky looked as black as sin. The house pitched in the wind as a boat in a hurricane. Precipitous white whirled deception over the landscape, disguising ugliness as beauty, taintedness as purity, and treachery as truth. Death came quicker than Maddie could have imagined... clawing, scratching, pounding... Satan’s hellhounds would soon gain entry. The howl of the ghoul became a pitiful gurgle and then quieted but for breathing as heavy as a handsaw at work. In and out, back and forth, sliding down the door... Maddie knew it was the rabid Harris man.
The perfect scenario for the preacher to blackmail her... and he does this by pressing his influence in the local KKK group, ordering Maddie to stop her doctoring or be accused of witchcraft, along with the demand to stop associating with her black friends, else someone’s neck will find the noose; and last, she has a time limit to leave town or her secret sin will be revealed. Hannah watches her grandmother vacillate between acquiescence and fight, and when Ren reveals a very painful secret to Maddie, they all make a plan to bring the preacher to his knees.
“Being convicted by humans does not always make one a criminal,” Maddie whispered. “It’s not following the convictions of your own heart that might deliver a more unbearable sentence than any verdict from a court of law.”
Honestly, I must admit hearing “Goodbye, Earl” by the Dixie Chicks in the back of my head as they laid out the plan and brought it to fruition... however, with Maddie’s instinctive desire to heal instead of kill... well, you’ll just have to read this to see what happens to the pompous preacher... and to his horse. For the most part, the beginning was a little slow and muddled as I tried to make the connections between the families and friendships, but the story settles into a fine pace, building steam as the snow blankets over the town and characters. Watching the characters (just like Hannah watches) dig themselves out of the situations and the snow storm, not to mention the old-time way of thinking lends to a worthwhile tale.
*****
“Winter’s Reckoning” by Adele Holmes receives four stars from The Historical Fiction Company.
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