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“The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop—an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present.”—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century.
At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house’s dark history, the three women’s connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property’s rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance.
Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 13, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593742778
- File size: 302717 KB
- Duration: 10:30:39
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 9, 2015
This well-researched, intriguing historical novel from MacArthur fellow Miles (The House on Diamond Hill) delves into the little-known story of the prosperous Cherokee slaveholders in the antebellum South. In the present day, Jinx Micco, a Cherokee-Creek part-time librarian and newspaper columnist, lives in Ocmulgee, Okla. While conducting tribal research, she looks in to a missionary school on Cherokee chief James Hold’s plantation in Georgia, called the Cherokee Rose. She discovers his manor house, now a state museum strapped for funds, is going up for auction and travels to the Cherokee Rose to learn the true fate of one student, Mary Ann Battis. Meanwhile, Cheyenne Cotterell, a wealthy interior designer from Atlanta, decides to buy the Cherokee Rose in order to set up an upscale bed-and-breakfast and get back to her Native American roots. The third protagonist is Ruth Mayes, a magazine writer from Minneapolis and Cheyenne’s childhood friend, who arrives at the Cherokee Rose to write a feature story. When Cheyenne’s $1.5 million offer outbids the real estate tycoon Mason Allen, she makes a vengeful enemy. Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne form a sisterly alliance and befriend Adam Battis, an unemployed park ranger, former caretaker of the museum, and descendent of Chief Hold. The women soon unearth a lost diary, which brings to a close Miles’s wrenching yet enlightening saga. Readers will be taken with the way this novel blends past and present.
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