Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Sometimes the truth is found in a folktale.
1932. Cumberland Island off the coast of Southern Georgia is a strange place to encounter the opulence of the Gilded Age, but the last vestiges of the famed philanthropic Carnegie family still take up brief seasonal residence in their grand mansions there. This year’s party at Plum Orchard is a lively group: young men from some of America’s finest families who come to experience the area’s hunting beside a local guide, a beautiful debutante expecting to be engaged by the week’s end, and a promising female artist who believes she has meaningful ties to her wealthy hosts. But when temptations arise and passions flare, an evening of revelry and storytelling goes horribly awry. Lives are both lost and ruined.
1959. Reclusive painter Cleo Woodbine has lived alone for decades on Kingdom Come, a tiny strip of land once occupied by the servants for the great houses on nearby Cumberland. When she is visited by the man who saved her life nearly thirty years earlier, a tempest is unleashed as the stories of the past gather and begin to regain their strength. Frances Flood is a folklorist come to Cumberland Island seeking the source of a legend—and also information about her mother, who was among the guests at a long-ago hunting party. Audrey Howell, briefly a newlywed and now newly widowed, is running a local inn. When she develops an eerie double exposure photograph, some believe she’s raised a ghost—someone who hasn’t been seen since that fateful night in 1932.
Southern mythology and personal reckoning collide in this sweeping story inspired by the little-known history of Cumberland Island when a once-in-a-century storm threatens the natural landscape. Faced with a changing world, two timelines and the perspectives of three women intersect where a folktale meets the truth to reveal what Cumberland Island has hidden all along.
The lives of three women intersect in an expansive tale set in 1959 focused around Cumberland Island.
Author Kimberly Brock delivers The Fabled Earth and its complex main character, Cleo Woodbine. For all intents and purposes, Cleo has cultivated a life as a reclusive artist.
As a main character, Cleo plays a role in a highly complex storyline that shifts between the present time of 1959 and an ill-fated house party from 1932. It’s slow going at first, but the author’s writing style effectively provokes introspection. The answers to the questions are revealed as the story develops.
The events of 1932 have been couched in stories, casting doubt on the facts. Those facts rise to the surface as two other women are added to the mix—one who seeks the truth and one who has a strange photograph.
The Fabled Earth serves up a complex tale full of mystery amid the backdrop of Cumberland Island.
Kimberly Brock is the award-winning author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and The River Witch. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. She lives near Atlanta with her husband and three children.
