In Appalachia Kentucky, before Nurse Women, there were Granny Women
March 1881. The creek is up, fever is moving cabin to cabin, and a moonshiner is hammering on Zettie's door in the worst storm of the spring. His wife has took her pains. The granny woman is aged way beyond her years, widowed, and there's a rattle down in her chest she hasn't told a living soul about.
She goes anyway. She always has.
But crossing that black water, Zettie carries a harder secret than the one in her lungs. Her granny told her long ago that a granny woman always knows her last trip when it comes.
Zettie wouldn't stop the work to think on her own life, she carries on.
What waits in that cabin is a birth gone wrong, a house full of fever, and a night that will demand everything she has left. Forty years of names in her leather book, and the one thing Zettie never found in all these hollers is the pair of hands she's supposed to leave it to.
Unless the mountain sends her one before her final evening arrives.
From the award-winning Christian fiction author of Run, Girls comes a story of Appalachian historical fiction set in the 19th-century Kentucky mountains: a granny woman, a frontier midwife with forty years of names in her book, and one storm-black night that will decide who carries the mountain's medicine after her. Clean, character-driven, and readable in one evening by the fire. For readers of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and Catherine Marshall's Christy.
Jenny is from Eastern, Kentucky, and is a writer of novels based on true stories in Appalachia. She lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina and is a full-time nurse.
This short story includes a preview of The Bruised Dawn, Book One of the Nurse Woman series, coming February 2027.
Genre: Historical
March 1881. The creek is up, fever is moving cabin to cabin, and a moonshiner is hammering on Zettie's door in the worst storm of the spring. His wife has took her pains. The granny woman is aged way beyond her years, widowed, and there's a rattle down in her chest she hasn't told a living soul about.
She goes anyway. She always has.
But crossing that black water, Zettie carries a harder secret than the one in her lungs. Her granny told her long ago that a granny woman always knows her last trip when it comes.
Zettie wouldn't stop the work to think on her own life, she carries on.
What waits in that cabin is a birth gone wrong, a house full of fever, and a night that will demand everything she has left. Forty years of names in her leather book, and the one thing Zettie never found in all these hollers is the pair of hands she's supposed to leave it to.
Unless the mountain sends her one before her final evening arrives.
From the award-winning Christian fiction author of Run, Girls comes a story of Appalachian historical fiction set in the 19th-century Kentucky mountains: a granny woman, a frontier midwife with forty years of names in her book, and one storm-black night that will decide who carries the mountain's medicine after her. Clean, character-driven, and readable in one evening by the fire. For readers of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and Catherine Marshall's Christy.
Jenny is from Eastern, Kentucky, and is a writer of novels based on true stories in Appalachia. She lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina and is a full-time nurse.
This short story includes a preview of The Bruised Dawn, Book One of the Nurse Woman series, coming February 2027.
Genre: Historical
Used availability for Jenny Cafaro's Granny Midwife Zettie