The Last Carolina Girl, Meagan Church
The Last Carolina Girl, Meagan Church
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Last Carolina Girl

Author: Meagan Church

Narrator: Susan Bennett

Unabridged: 9 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/28/2023


Synopsis

Some folks will do anything to break the wild spirit of a Carolina girl

For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah’s country life is as natural to her as the loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky.

When an accident takes her father’s life, Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from her only home, Leah is kept apart from the family and forced to act as a helpmate for the well-to-do household. When a moment of violence and
prejudice thrusts Leah into the center of the state’s shameful darkness, she must fight for her own future against a world that doesn’t always value the wild spirit of a Carolina girl.

Set in 1935 against the very real backdrop of a recently formed state eugenics board, The Last Carolina Girl is a powerful and heart-wrenching story of fierce strength, forgotten history, autonomy, and the places and people we ultimately call home.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mai on April 17, 2025

This is being compared to WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, which I don't think is fair, because in my opinion, it's a much better book. I spent years ashamed of growing up in the American South, but lately, I find myself reminiscing for slower days and hot summer nights. There are many things I don't miss,......more

Goodreads review by Karren on March 28, 2023

Leah Payne and her father Harley live in Brunswick County, NC, and her dad works as a lumberjack. They live in a little shack on Mr. Barna’s property, she’s friends with his son Jesse and maid Tulla. Leah loves the beach and the ocean and when she grows up she wants to build a house on the coastline......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth of Silver's Reviews on April 08, 2023

How much can a young girl take? Leah lost her mother and lived with her father. They were very close and very poor, but then he was killed in a logging accident. She was sent to live with a family that Leah thought would be her new family, but it was not the case. Leah was treated like a servant and c......more

Goodreads review by Amy on March 10, 2024

Have you ever been truly sorry you read something? I really did not care for this book, and for the way its made me feel after having experienced it. I took a shower trying to shake it off. Its going to be a rough day with this lurking in my consciousness. That poor girl, and the darkness in some pe......more

Goodreads review by Scottsdale Public Library on January 10, 2023

Leah loves trips to the sea with her father and their home in the North Carolina woods. After her father dies, she is torn from this home and the only people she loves. Leah is indomitable and she needs to be as she struggles to be accepted and find a home. Author Megan Church tells a heartbreaking......more