“Lucy Tanner walked down the hall and out the front door. She felt a shift – not only in the seasons but in life, too. She read in the paper yesterday that the United States had officially entered a war in southeast Asia. A Catholic was running for president, and a new drug was on the market – the birth control pill. Change was coming, and she wanted to be a part of it – not a bystander.”
 
It was 1960, and the conflict between then and now impacted even “The Tanner Side of Town,” located in the North Georgia mountains, which was once the heart of the great Cherokee nation. 
A proposed iron ore mine threatened the agrarian livelihood of every landowner who lived on the Valley Road – including the Tanners – Luke and his wife, Genevieve, and their daughter Lucy and her son, Hank…not to mention that the serenity of the Ridge’s virgin forests would forever be lost. Fueled by Jack Cooper’s greed and disregard of others, the controversy set into motion a string of events that upended the community and reshaped lives forever.
 
Never shrinking from protecting what was her family’s, Lucy fought the Cooper force that had always controlled Kings County. After Hunter Fox, a flame from her past, reentered Lucy’s life, love – which she had sworn never to do again – put another kink in the life she struggled to understand. 
 
Add to the mix her family’s unconventional African-American business partner, Nettie Andrews, whose timid examination into a sordid past could potentially open the door to to unanswered questions, and the result is a riveting story about life in the South on the cusp of perhaps the most monumental cultural and social change in our country’s history.