HANG THE MOON
Jeanette Wall
Simon & Schuster Canada
March 28, 2023
368 pages
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Hang the Moon is totally different than most of the books I read. It’s a Western (except the setting is Virginia), it’s women’s fiction, it’s historical fiction, it’s full of drama, it involves bootlegging and women carrying around rifles. I admit I did not know what I was getting into. I chose to read it because of the author. But, it turned out to be a good choice.
Our protagonist is Sallie Kincaid. She is the daughter of The Duke, the “emperor” of a town called Caywood, Virginia. She is a strong young lady, astute and does not want to sit around embroidering doilies. Circumstances force her to grow up in a hurry.
The remaining cast of characters is very diverse. There’s a teetotaler reverend who wants to clean up the booze. It’s Prohibition, you know. And an aunt who has been known to be a bit of a floozy, but sadly, she has been a victim of abuse. There is a housekeeper who is vocal about expressing her opinion. And a widow who remarries and is re-widowed and again remarries, and might be re-rewidowed. But, she is pregnant! Who’s the father? To complicate matters even more, one of the dead husbands isn’t dead but really prefers men over women. The town’s people are an interesting bunch too.
This all sounds like over-the-top melodrama. But, seriously, it works! Most of the time. The underground bootlegging plays a large part in the town’s economy but it does get quite violent.
This book was not what I expected. It was interesting. It detailed a way of life which was real in the 1920s but I knew very little about it. I always think that if can learn something from a book, it was worth reading it. I think that one of the things that was a big surprise was that people were prone to take the law into their own hands with very few repercussions. Or, they live by their own laws.
It was mostly a fun and interesting read. But as it got closer to the end of the book, some of the incidents were just over the top. Still entertaining but it could have come down a notch.
I appreciate that the author did a lot of research into the bootlegging days of prohibition. In the Acknowledgments, she explains how many of the characters were inspired by real people of the day, as were many of the incidents.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.
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