Heart of the Green Leaf

One summer. One farm. One girl finding the courage to grow. Fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, The Secret Life of Bees, and Where the Watermelons Grow will be drawn to this richly layered Southern debut, full of heart, hope, and the wild beauty of a girl finding her place in a complicated world. In the summer of 1964, fourteen-year-old Maralee Truett faces the hardest season of her life-on the land she loves and in a family strained by unspoken pain. Life on her family's Eastern North Carolina tobacco farm is far from easy. Her father, haunted by WWII, grows more volatile by the day. Her mother retreats into silence, and her brother rebels against family expectations. Maralee, caught in the middle, quietly tends to the animals, her talent overlooked, her voice often unheard. As the summer unfolds, she finds an unlikely friendship in Josie Billings, a bold Black girl who challenges how Maralee sees the world. And when sparks fly with the new boy in town, Maralee begins to see herself differently. But when a crisis with her father forces her to act impulsively, Maralee sets off an alarming chain of events that changes everything. In the aftermath, she must wrestle with guilt, loyalty, and the question of whether she can be more than just the girl who keeps the peace. Heart of the Green Leaf is a moving coming-of-age story about resilience, tackling mental illness, racism, and the legacy of trauma with grace and grit. Written for teens and adults alike, it explores what it means to grow strong-even when the roots are tangled.