Tudor Alliances and Virginia Bootlegging in “Hang the Moon”

Hang the Moon is a new novel by Jeannette Walls, the author of the amazing memoir The Glass Castle.  

Hang the Moon is fiction set in Prohibition Virginia, telling the story of Sallie Kincaid and the whole Kincaid family. Readers see Sallie grow from childhood, when she’s hoping to be the fastest in her wagon to impress her father, to adulthood, supporting her neighbors with a little nighttime rumrunning…

In The Glass Castle, I was constantly amazed by how the children just accepted their upbringing, no matter how weird or dysfunctional it got, and Walls does the same thing in Hang the Moon. Sallie Kincaid just accepts her life as the Duke’s daughter, obviously she’s the local princess with a volatile father.  Obviously, the Duke rents out most of the nearby housing, and accepts payment in cash, whiskey which will be sold in the family’s Emporium, or in Kincaid scrip, a local currency for buying and selling in  Emporium.  Of course, that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? The story is wildly different from The Glass Castle, of course, but there’s the same feeling of a charismatic, volatile, confusing father.

There’s a great deal of family drama in Hang The Moon, all around this moonshine empire that the Duke inherited and then expanded on. The Kincaids are the wealthiest, most powerful family for miles. I have to say that the Tudor family tree works incredibly well for a Southern Gothic family. It works so well that I didn’t pick up on the parallels for a while, since Mary, Jane, Eddie, and Tom are pretty common Virginia names, too. While I was reading, I had a passing thought that there was a Jane and a Seymour in this convoluted family, and isn’t that funny, like Jane Seymour? And Jane is the Duke’s third wife, just like Jane Seymour! And then I kept reading without putting it together. It was only the part about Mary’s pregnancy that tipped me off, and even then, I was still thinking that I must be reading too many Tudor dramas… 

Hang the Moon tells a drama about rural moonshine makers and heavy-handed Prohibitionists, about inheritance and class.  There are funny moments, like when successful rumrunner Sallie agrees to take a bored deb along one night,  but the joke is never at the expense of the rural residents. The Tudor parallels work particularly well here, so when there’s shootout or standoff, it feels more like a royal rebellion than a redneck story. Overall, I loved Sallie’s creative, unusual solutions to unsurmountable problems in her family and in her community.

Hang the Moon is written by Jeannette Walls, and will be published by Scribner on March 28, 2023. I received a copy of this book to review, opinions and reactions on my book blog are my own, as always.