Even As We Breathe
Annette Saunooke ClapsaddleFinalist for the Weatherford Award
Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn & Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle & suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. The experience introduces him to the beautiful & enigmatic Essie Stamper—a young Cherokee woman who is also working at the inn & dreaming of a better life.With World War II raging in Europe, the resort is the temporary home of Axis diplomats & their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. A secret room becomes a place where Cowney & Essie can escape the white world of the inn & imagine their futures free of the shadows of their families' pasts. Outside of this refuge, however, racism & prejudice are never far behind, and when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing, Cowney finds himself accused of abduction & murder.
Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, & flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, & ethnic divides. Betrayed by the friends he trusted, he begins to unearth deeper mysteries as he works to prove his innocence & clear his name. This richly written debut novel explores the immutable nature of the human spirit and the idea that physical existence, with all its strife & injustice, will not be humanity's lasting legacy.
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In 2020, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s debut Even As We Breathe was the first known published novel by an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water is winner of the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) & a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014).