Daughters of Green Mountain Gap


Fiction - Historical - Event/Era
324 Pages
Reviewed on 11/08/2023
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Author Biography

Born in Athens, Greece as an Air Force brat, Teri M Brown graduated from UNC Greensboro. She began her writing career helping small businesses with content creation and published five nonfiction self-help books dealing with real estate and finance, receiving multiple awards. In 2017, after winning the First Annual Anita Bloom Ornoff Award for Inspirational Short Story, she began writing fiction in earnest, and published her debut novel in 2022, Sunflowers Beneath the Snow, a historical fiction set in Ukraine, which has won 12 awards including Finalist in the 2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards for Women’s Fiction, 1st place 2022 Incipere Award for Historical Fiction, and 2022 Book Shelf Award Winner. Her second novel published in 2023, An Enemy Like Me, takes place during WWII, winning 27 awards including Finalist for the 2022 Hemingway CIBAs, Finalist for the NIEA in Military Fiction, and 1st Place BookFest Awards Spring 2023 for historical fiction. Her latest novel, Daughters of Green Mountain Gap, a generational story about Appalachian healers came out in January 2024 and has already won five awards. In June 2024, her short story, The Youngest Lighthouse Keeper, came out in the anthology Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women. Teri is a wife, mother, grandmother, and author who loves word games, reading, bumming on the beach, taking photos, singing in the shower, hunting for bargains, ballroom dancing, playing bridge, and mentoring others. Learn more at www.terimbrown.com.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite

Daughters of Green Mountain Gap by Teri M Brown is a moving, multi-generational story of three rural North Carolina women at the end of the nineteenth century. Maggie McCoury is a healing woman, known as a Granny Woman, and is much sought after around Green Mountain Gap for her knowledge of plants and medicinal herbs. She has garnered much of her healing knowledge by listening to and learning from the local Cherokee medicine man. Although the God-fearing townsfolk dislike and distrust the Cherokee, they do appreciate Maggie’s ability to cure ailments. Maggie’s daughter Carrie Ann, though, is less enamored with her mother’s abilities and secretly blames her mother for being unable to save her father when he was sick. She has studied to be a nurse and is determined to bring science and “real” medicine to Green Mountain Gap. Carrie Ann’s daughter Josie Mae, however, believes in her grandmother’s power and wants to be just like her. The three women have to negotiate their fragile relationships and the constant reality of sickness and death from unknown and dangerous contagions in this era between science and faith.

Daughters of Green Mountain Gap is a fantastic and illuminating read of a seminal period of history as science and faith intersected and often clashed. Author Teri M Brown has created three utterly engaging characters; strong, independent, and fiercely loyal women who are not afraid to speak their minds and stick to their convictions. I particularly enjoyed the constant emotional tension between Maggie and Carrie Ann as well as that between Carrie Ann and Josie Mae. I appreciated the irony that whilst the people of Green Mountain Gap were happy to embrace the cures and medicine Maggie provided, they still had an intense fear and distrust of the Cherokee people from whom she had learned much of her trade. I also liked that the doctor, Daniel, was so open to Maggie’s healing and could see the gift that she had, whereas her daughter was too blinded by her anger and belief in modernity to see what was glaringly obvious to others. The concept of balance resonated with me when they discussed the fact that both modern medicines and some herbal remedies had two sides to them, both a negative (poisonous side) and a positive (healing side). Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this wonderful story is the importance of belief and attitude in the healing process, not only for the patient but for those who administer the medicine and the patient’s loved ones. This is a wonderful read that I thoroughly enjoyed.