Miss Katie's Rosewood: A Novel Phillips, Michael

The American South, post-Civil War — a place where old certainties have crumbled and new realities refuse to take clear shape. Michael Phillips sets his story at Rosewood, a plantation where the war's end hasn't brought the freedom anyone hoped for. Katie, a young white woman, and Mayme, a formerly enslaved woman, find themselves unlikely partners trying to hold onto the land and build something resembling a life. Phillips doesn't shy away from the brutal complexities of Reconstruction — the violence, the fear, the tentative friendships that defy every social rule. What emerges is a portrait of two women navigating a world that wants to tear them apart, held together by necessity and, eventually, something like kinship. For readers who want their historical fiction unflinching and their characters flawed but striving.