Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR’s All Things Considered. “A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It’s riveting … tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It’s riveting in all the right ways — a damn good read that stayed with me long after closing the covers.” – Timothy Egan, New York Times bestselling author of The Worst Hard Time
From a blazing new voice in fiction, a gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads west
In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess’s quest lands her in the employ of the territory’s violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah–dead or alive.
Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.
Told in Jess’s wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself–and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.
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1885, somewhere in Montana or Wyoming Territory. After her pa dies and their meager spread is rustled, Jessalyn cuts off her hair, saddles her trusty mare Ingrid, and dresses as a boy to brave the Wild West in search of her older brother who has become a notorious outlaw. It’s a brutal landscape where life is cheap, and Jess lives by her wits, bunking with an odd assortment of males after she finally gets a job as the territorial governor’s pet sharp shooter. Wonderfully written and highly entertaining, although there will be gore. Those with queasy stomachs may want to pass on this one. It’s a great adventure, and I couldn’t put it down.
Wow. You know it is good literature when it draws you in, makes you part of the story and doesn’t let go till the last line of the last page and it ends. No longer moving forward, just leaving you with the memory of the events and unforgettable characters–some you love and some you hate–forever immortalized on pages. Masterfully written with beautiful passages, like, “Bury your hands in the common loam and feel there the blood sent like a flood upon this place.” A powerful book that will haunt me for a long time.