The Cherokee Rose

Description

The Cherokee Rose : A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts

After one of her regular readers takes issue with her weekly history column, Jinx Micco, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) tribal historian,  finds herself on the road from Oklahoma to the Hold House, a plantation home in Georgia originally owned by the Cherokee Chief James Hold, uncover the  mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian Removal.

There, she meets Ruth, visiting on a magazine assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to connect with her family’s history by purchasing the whole estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young woman who disappeared from tribal records. As Jinx and Ruth are drawn closer together, they challenge Cheyenne to look more deeply at the home she has purchased, and when they discover a diary left on the property by a Moravian missionary that reveals the house’s dark history, the three women’s personal connections to the place grow deeper. Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the rightful ownership of the property, Jinx reexamines her assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s traumas and then surprises herself by falling into a new romance.

Imbued with a nuanced understanding of the intertwined histories of Indigenous and African Americans, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.