March 6, 2025
Daughters of Green Mountain Gap
Teri M. Brown
Atmosphere Press (2024)
ISBN: 9798891320567
New Novel Exploring Generational Healing Wins Historical Fiction Award
Teri M. Brown’s newest novel, Daughters of Green Mountain Gap, has won the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction in this year’s Reader Views Literary Awards. And guess what? It’s the second year in a row that Teri Brown has one. She is the first author ever to win the award twice and to win it consecutively. I couldn’t be more delighted because I loved this book even more than her winner last year, An Enemy Like Me.
And look at the list of other awards Daughters of Green Mountain Gap has already won:
Global Spines Book Award Winner
2024 Readers Favorite Award - Gold in Historical Fiction
2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards - Gold - Women's Fiction
2024 BREW Fiction Book Excellence Award - Historical Fiction of the Year
Royal Dragonfly Book Awards - 1st Place - Historical Fiction
International Firebird Book Award - First Place Women's Fiction
2024 Readers Favorite Award - Gold in Historical Fiction
2024 BookFest Awards - First Place Historical Fiction
NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award - Best Books in Historical Fiction
The Difference Maker Badge
2024 HFC Book of the Year - Hawthorne US - Silver Award
Literary Global Book Awards - Historical Fiction Finalist
2024 Author Shout Reader Ready Awards - Top Pick
Autumn 2024 Readers’ Choice Book Awards - Silver Best Adult Book
2024 American Writing Awards - Historical Fiction Finalist
2024 American Fiction Awards - Historical Fiction Finalist
2024 International Impact Book Awards Winner
2024 Zibby Awards - Best Book for the History Lover
What makes this novel so loved? Well, it’s the story of three women in one family who are all devoted to healing but in different ways. Maggie, the family matriarch, is a traditional healer, known as a “granny woman.” Living in the backwoods of North Carolina, she uses herbs and wise women’s methods to help her neighbors, along with knowledge she has learned from the local Cherokee. Her daughter, Carrie Ann, is a nurse, trained at a college, who looks down on her mother’s methods, which she considers little more than magical wishing at best and dangerous at worst when lives are threatened and people choose her mother’s methods over modern medicine. The novel is set in the early 1890s, a time when modern medicine was starting to replace what today are known as homeopathic remedies. Caught between the two women is Josie Mae, Carrie Ann’s daughter, who has largely been raised by her grandmother while her mother focused on her medical studies. Josie Mae feels closer to her grandmother and is torn between her desire for her mother’s love and approval and her belief in her grandmother’s methods.
The novel is full of conflict between the three women. The chapters alternate between each character’s perspective, creating a rich tapestry of viewpoints that ultimately weave together into a new level of understanding between them.
At the root of discord is not so much the debate on the proper way to treat an illness, but the fact that Maggie was unable to save her husband when he died of cancer. Carrie Ann has never forgiven her mother for her father’s death and not taking him to a hospital or doctor—though neither were nearby in those days. When others in the community die whom Maggie tries to help, the tension only increases between mother and daughter until even Maggie begins to question her methods.
But beyond the discord, a deeper message fills the novel. Questions are raised about why bad things happen to good people, why death takes some and leaves others to bear the weight of grief, and the role of faith and intuition in the ability to heal.
Teri M. Brown already showed herself a master of depicting internal conflict in her previous novel, An Enemy Like Me, in which a German-American must decide whether to fight for his adopted country against his ancestral fatherland. As well-written as that novel was, Daughters of Green Mountain Gap feels even more mature and stronger in the development of its characters. Its plot is tighter because of the shorter timeframe it covers. The answers to the moral questions it raises are even harder to find, and the ending even more visionary and cathartic.
Daughters of Green Mountain Gap accomplishes what literature’s true purpose is—to depict the human experience in its most meaningful and complicated ways. It will make readers pause to rethink how they relate to others, teaching them to be less judgmental, more forgiving, and more open to trusting that a force greater than us will set everything right in the end. With this novel, Teri M. Brown shows she has become a true force among writers of modern-day fiction.
For more information about Teri M. Brown and Daughters of Green Mountain Gap, visit Amazon.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of The Mysteries of Marquette
