Bloodroot Book

A stunning fiction debut about the legacies—of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and heartbreak—that one family wrestles with across generations, from the Great Depression to today.

Told in a kaleidoscope of voices, Bloodroot is at once a moving exploration of familial love and the story of an incendiary romance that consumes everyone in its path: Myra Lamb, a wild young girl with mysterious “haint” blue eyes who grows up on remote Bloodroot Mountain; her grandmother, Byrdie Lamb, who protects Myra fiercely and passes down “the touch” that bewitches people and animals alike; the neighbor boy who longs for Myra but is destined never to have her; Myra’s children, who must reckon with all that they have inherited from their mother; and John Odom, the young man who tries to tame Myra and meets with disaster.

With grace and unflinching verisimilitude, Amy Greene brings these characters—the people of her...

The New York Times - Lisa Fugard

…this story is really about the fraught, sometimes dangerous, bonds between children and their mothers, and the appalling spillover of violence from one generation to the next…In unadorned but assured prose, Greene…takes her readers to the hard scrabble world of foster homes and juvenile detention centers, of life in a blue-collar Appalachian town