num_pages: 271
description: An NPR Book of the Year  Winner of the 2017 Southern Book PrizeGold IPPY Award  Indie Next Pick May 2016Its 1939 and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey who is immediately drawn to the lady agents self-possession. Already cracks are emerging in Irenies fragile marriage to Brodis an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husbands bed storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis these are all the signs that Irenietiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirtis practicing black magic.When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life linked to the lady agent or perhaps to other more sinister forces.Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell this mesmerizing and award-winning debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change escape and reproductive choicestalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity cant quite dispel.
language: English
title: Over the Plain Houses
publisher: Hub City Press