Raised in Durham, N.C., by a single mom who works two jobs and buys discount groceries to keep the household afloat, Berie is at a crossroads. Her mother believes that her only child’s ticket to a better future is a college education, so she sells a family heirloom to pay for it.

Berie, however, yearns for what she calls “a more essential life”: “To me essential meant a life more connected to wild nature. I’d always known there was magic on the margins, there was a world beyond my mother’s world, where a dinner that ‘went off without a hitch’ meant a dinner where no one talked about anything that mattered. … She wanted a life of safety for me, as though safety were still possible on the choked earth. Safety was a relic from before humans destroyed the world.”

Instead of enrolling in college, she follows a man named Bay who approaches her at a bus station, offering her the promise of a new family: a band of eco-terrorists living on a small farm in a secluded holler of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a visitor, she’s told she may stay “three days or the rest of your life” — an ironclad rule that will take on dire overtones as the novel progresses.

The Ash Family’s two dozen communards are ruled by Dice, a former power-plant engineer who had something of an enviro-epiphany when he noticed fish dying downstream from his work. A “small man with a slow smile,” Dice imposes a cultlike discipline on his ragged followers. He gives them new names and forbids them from falling in love, having children, taking “fake-world medicine,” reading or writing, even using phones or mirrors.

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Berie is renamed Harmony, and her long tresses are chopped off with sheep shears so her bad haircut matches the others’.