I did not want this book to end! It is a riveting story about an independent, driven, smart woman named Sallie Kincaid. Set in the twenties during Prohibition, this is a chronicle of a small Virginia town and how they used bootlegging to fuel the economy. The story is about much more, though. It is about Sallie and her complicated family. A well-researched historical novel and a compelling read. Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read and review an advance copy of this book.

Sallie Kincaid has not had an easy life. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father, whom she adores, the Duke, as everyone calls him. He's an unofficial administrator of sorts in his Virginia County. He keeps things running and it's not always legal. It's the understanding and the way of the world. What about Prohibition if making moonshine and exchanging it for common staples amongst the townspeople who are trying to survive?

This book is full of family drama, dysfunction and secrets. Set in Virginia against the backdrop of Prohibition, Walls blurs the lines of what is expected and what Sallie wants for herself. Why should a girl have to get married to find her place in life? Sallie charts an unconventional course, one she feels is in the spirit of her father. But what she learns along the way teaches her more than she every expected.

Sallie Kincaid is fierce and feisty and, as promised, I did really enjoy her character. The rest of the characters lacked depth though and the story fell flat for me. I love historical fiction though and there was a lot of unique history that I hadn't read about before, so that part of the novel was interesting. Overall though, this wasn't my favorite and unless you're really interested in the Prohibition era, I wouldn't recommend it.

Thank you to Net Galley for an ARC of this novel.

I was so excited to read this book. I loved The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses. Jeannette Walls is such a captivating storyteller. It never takes me long to become completely immersed in her stories; however, this one feels like it was written by a different person. Or maybe the same person but without a lot of conviction. It was like she wasn’t sure what to write about so she just wrote about everything. Maybe her strengths are in telling real stories, not inventing stories. Something about this one did not feel authentic. The entire storyline was so far-fetched and unrealistic. Character development is an important part of a story for me. There were so many characters in this one that it was hard to focus on who they were as people. Most of them were so unlikeable that I didn’t want to get to know them. They were self-righteous, entitled, greedy and impulsive. Sallie was the heroine, the protagonist, the one you are supposed to like and for the most part, I did. She was a spitfire. She was a strong, independent female before females were supposed to be strong and independent. She pushed the limits and stretched the boundaries. I loved the concept of her character but felt she was a little over the top sometimes. As is typical with Walls’ stories, her attention to detail was spot on. Her descriptions of places, landscapes, and events are full of details that let you see the story unfolding. I like the concept for the book but it felt forced like it was as hard for her to write as it was for me to read.

*There is one line in Chapter 2 (Location 398 on my kindle) that I think has a typo. "As part of me does, the part that is thrilled to be having this talk, the Duke fussing over me, marking sure I'm warm, recalling out times together." Is "marking" supposed to be "making?

4.5 stars, rounded up.
Meet Sallie Kincaid, a fierce loyal young girl in Virginia during prohibition times. Sallie is the daughter of the most powerful man in their county and oh how she looks up to her father. Her mother died when she was 3 and her father remarried, step-mom is not a fan of Sallie's and when Sallie's little brother is injured during a wagon accident, Sallie is blamed and sent away to her Aunt's.

Jump ahead nine years and Sallie is back home and nearly 18 years old. She still has a complicated relationship with her father but she is able to convince him to let her have a job in his company. The story spans more years after her return, prohibition is now law and Sallie becomes aware of how much their fortunes are tied to bootleg whiskey.

I have always preferred books with strong character elements and this certainly filled the bill for me. Not only was Sallie well-constructed but so are the family members around her. Sallie grows so much over the years as she deals with strong-willed people trying to get their own piece of the pie. There is a lot of death, some natural some not. there were times when I wondered if it was overblown but then it was the times.

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend reading it. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Hang the Moon
by Jeannette Walls
Pub Date: March 28, 2023
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.
I have been anticipating the release of this novel for some time. The author is the writer of the amazing memoir The Glass Castle which our book club adored. As we read The Glass Castle our book club discussed how children just accept their upbringing no matter how weird or dysfunctional. Walls does the same thing in Hang the Moon.
There is a lot of family drama in this book, all around this moonshine empire that the Duke inherited.
You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.

What a wild ride! Sallie Kincaid’s colorful family offers one surprise after another. Her daddy, the Duke, was married three times, and was a ladies man. Sallie adored her father. She thought he had ‘hung the moon and scattered the stars.’ Her daddy taught her to be the “fastest woman on earth,” riding her wagon down the steep hill. When she takes her step-brother on a ride and he is hurt, her step-mom insisted that Sallie be sent away. Sallie spent nine years with her aunt in poverty, barely making ends meet. With the step-mom’s death, the Duke takes Sallie back, tasked with caring for his motherless son.

The Duke runs the county. He owns the land and rents to farmers, taking the rent in trade, the products sold in his store. Mostly, that trade is moonshine whiskey, which is in great demand during Prohibition. The Duke is also into politics. His brother-in-law is sheriff. The Duke is coldly ruthless when he needs to be, and dispenses justice as he sees fit. After all, the federal government is a long way away. On the good side, he is fair, and helps those in need.

The book is a hoot, a page-turner, with a strong young woman at the center, learning her way in the world, taking it on headlong. As tragedy after tragedy rends the family, Sallie takes on her father’s work, standing up to a rival family with a long memory. She is fearless, a survivor, her daddy’s true heir. Doing what needs to be done takes her into a dark place, and she realizes that she must find a better path.

Sallie learns about love and the unreliability of men, both from the woman around her and through personal experience. She has a big heart, and incorporates abandoned women and children into her household.

There are two kinds of family, those you’re born into and those you put together from the pieces that don’t go anywhere else, and this is one of those families.
from Hang the Moon by Jeanette Walls

Walls’s story was inspired by actual people and events.

Thanks for the publisher for a free book through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review

This historical fiction by Jeannette Walls was well written and entertaining. It was full of strong women characters and gives the reader a feel for life during prohibition. Thank you Net Galley for letting me read the ARC of this book in return for my honest opinion.

Set in Virginia 1020s and 30s, Sallie is the privileged daughter of the Duke, who runs the county. When a childhood accident changes things, Sallie is sent away to live with an aunt. Returning nine years later to try to reclaim her place in the family, she faces obstacles every step of the way. Our Sallie is a resourceful young woman and she finds ways to overcome these bumps in the road.

Sallie, determined not to be constrained by the roles of women, continues many of the things her father did, only she resolves to do it better. Repairing houses owned by the Kincaid family, making better deals for the liquor traded to the Emporium, she tries to better the people of the county. As the Depression settles in and Prohibition becomes a reality, Sallie gradually understands she has to be the one to fix things so her people don't starve to death. Thus, she becomes a rumrunner. She has a lot of adventures, some of which go well, some not so well, but Sallie remains indomitable.

What might feel like a southern, redneck story in another author's hands, Jeanette Walls is able to make us see real people, living real lives, and deserving of our concern and respect.

The power of family, a vibrant coming of age story and the fraught history of Prohibition all combine in this newest from Jeannette Walls. Sallie Kincaide is born into a bootlegging empire headed by her father Duke. Sent away by her stepmother as a child, Sallie returns as a young woman and must grapple with her place in the world and in her family. A unique historical fiction inspired by a true story.

This reminded me of Gone with the Wind. Sallie is a spunkier version of Scarlett that instead of cloning to marriage and a husband pushes the thought away and clings to her family.

My only comment would be the frequent introducing and removing characters ever couple chapters. The book was great but it moved very fast. Missing a paragraph meant missing a monumental piece of the puzzle.

I find Jeannette Walls captivating. She wraps me into her characters (both fiction and non) so tightly that they’ve stayed with me years past the final page. Hang the Moon will not be an exception to this rule.

We follow Sallie from her childhood through early womanhood, with some flashback to the tragedy of losing her mother at the age of three. I hate to spoil a great read, so I’ll leave you with this: The characters are robust, and the story flows vividly and beautifully. There’s so much beauty among the sadness.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for granting access to a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the publisher and the author for an advance copy of this book!

I have only read non-fiction (Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses) by Jeannette Walls. I thought this was more of the same; boy, was I wrong!

Sallie Kinkaid for President! She is a force to be reckoned with. I really enjoyed how her story was told from birth with flashbacks and then back to the present (1920's). At first, I thought it was very 'dumbed down" and slow but after reading a few chapters I think that was the authors point. Slow down and enjoy the ride.

If you enjoy a book about a functional dysfunctional family grab this one and take a seat. You will be in for a wild ride.

Fingers crossed this gets optioned into a Netflix series. It would be a great one!

The premise was good, the promise was hopeful, but the story, itself, fell short in myriad ways. I had the feeling that the author knew what her theme was (success of a woman in the early 20th century in spite of abundant obstacles), but didn’t really know how to get from the beginning to the end of the story.

The first half had a decent hook but the second half was … well … boring with an unfortunate ending.

I appreciate the ARC from NetGalley and the publisher, Scribner, in exchange for an honest review.

This book tells the story of a young woman trying to survive in a man's world during the prohibition in the 1920s Virginia. Her accurate storytelling of that time period takes you into a world of moonshining and feuding families that can't be stopped by the law. After the death of her father and other family members, Sallie has to take on the role of head of the family and try to ensure the survival of the county in which she grew up. A great book. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jeannette Walls really delivered with 'Hang the Moon'. The characters in the book were well developed and I loved how every mini-plot came together in the end. I will definitely be recommending this title to my library book group!

Excellent characterization, a slowly unfolding story and an evocative setting make this a really enjoyable and memorable piece of historical fiction. Highly recommended.

This book was chock full of grit, just like the Kincaid family. I absolutely relished my time with Sallie and was a nervous wreck through all of her adventures. There is lots of death and bad luck in the book, but the loss seems almost proportional to the fulfillment in the novel. The characters are so big and full of life. The setting is so vivid, I tended to forget I wasn’t actually living in the early 20th century. This book reads like an account of someone’s life and I can truly say I feel a loss having finished it. However, the fulfillment outweighs the loss, so am I am just grateful I was able to read this as an advanced copy. Thank you NetGalley and Simon and Shuster for this amazing adventure!

Duke Kincaid is a larger than life presence in rural Virginia and acts as the self appointed mayor. His family has a hand in just about everything in town but when tragedy strikes the family, seemingly over and over again, suddenly everything falls to young Sallie Kincaid’s shoulders. Not even 20 years old, Sallie finds herself as quite the rumrunner during prohibition.
Thanks to NetGalley, Scribner and the author for access to this ARC!

Author Jeannette Walls wrote her first book, The Glass Castle, a memoir, that seems to echo in her novels Half-Broke Horses, The Silver Star, and now Hang the Moon, due out in March. Walls knows kids, hard times, survival, unstable conditions, and chaos. She was the strong girl in The Glass Castle who challenged the injustices of the adult world, the same kind of character she creates in each of her books.

Walls borrowed from her Grandmother Lily’s life for Half Broke Horses, while this time around she finds material in her father Rex’s experience with running bootleg liquor in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of Duke Kincaid, a difficult man who runs the fictional town of Caywood. Although Sallie as a youngster thinks he hung the moon, she learns terrible truths about her father when she comes of age.

Forced to move to the mountains on the other side of the county when her stepmother declares Sallie is harmful to her young half-brother, Sallie lives with Aunt Faye, a woman she loves even when she’s old enough to hear that her aunt is considered a fallen woman. Once her stepmother dies nine years later, Sallie is no longer banished to the hills but is brought back home to take care of young Eddie.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub, Hang the Moon takes place in Virginia during Prohibition (1920-1933). While she knows she’s part of a wealthy family, it is after her father is out of the picture that Sallie comes to understand how his business always thrived: bootleg whisky. One by one, tragedy strikes, and only Sallie is left standing to take over Duke’s home and business, providing for other family members who emerge from the shadows.

Sallie faces numerous secrets and scandals among her family members, and in the business world, she is forced to deal with conflict and mayhem, fighting both the government that has prohibited liquor and also the feuding Bonds, a whisky-running family in a neighboring county. As in Walls’ other books, the protagonist – Sallie in this case – shows great courage and wisdom as she emerges as a leader in her town.

Jeannette Walls is a writer and journalist. She became a book author in 2005 with the release of her bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle. The book was adapted into a film and released in 2017. She lives in Virginia on a large farm with her husband.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 20, 2023.

I would like to thank Scribner, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.