Jason Taylor Morgan

The Red Field Jason Taylor Morgan

During the Civil War, twenty-five magical Johnson women hiding from Sherman's Army were killed in the family up mountain cemetery. Since then, the slain Johnsons have haunted it and turned it into powerful healing ground, known as the Red Field. Settled deep in 1928 Appalachia, each of the 1,199 townspeople of Redemption knows that nineteen-year-old Ruby Johnson, the last descendant of the Johnson witches, is a witch-healer-and revile her for it-but they need her just as they had generations of magical Johnson kinswomen before her. Wanting her own life, her own identity, to follow her own dreams, Ruby is reluctant to follow in her ancestors' infamous steps. Living amid the poverty, sexism, violence and ignorance of Appalachia during the early Twentieth Century, overnight, Ruby's world changes radically. A series of family tragedies and historical events overrun her. The first, when she is 15, after the death of her magical mother, Ruby is thrust into the role of being parent and provider for her five younger brothers and sisters and senile Civil War granddaddy. At her tender age, Ruby must take responsibility for overseeing and protecting the whole Johnson world. Married, pregnant, and raising her young siblings herself, Ruby and her family are "broke as sin with no Redeemer comin'." When the U. S. government orders Ruby and her family off Redemption Mountain, where the Johnson family has lived for centuries, she digs in her heels, stopping at nothing-and even calling on the magic of the Red Field for help-to protect what's hers. With a supporting group of vivid and eccentric characters, Ruby is a strong, resourceful young woman, defying the harsh odds of the early 20th Century American South. Ruby 's journey is full of hardship, beauty and magic and surviving despite fierce adversity. It is half survival and half destiny fulfilled. Jason Taylor Morgan's debut novel The Red Field is not to be missed.