Jordan R. Samuel is the pen name of Dixie Abernathy, a town commissioner in Camerton, North Carolina, a Charlotte suburb and a former teacher and administrator in the Gaston County Schools who is now a professor at Queens University in Charlotte. This novel is set in the area around Chimney Rock and Lake Lure in the North Carolina mountains where Abernathy has frequently visited. Across the Broken Bridge is the second novel in a trilogy which began with On the Eighteenth of May, which the author described as a “sad sweet love story” which involved considerable research on her part to carefully depict its connections with the Cherokee people. Across the Broken Bridge takes place primarily in the 1940 and 1950s. The protagonist, Burana, experiences trauma as a girl, and faces the very human challenge of deciding whether to turn her back on the broken bridges of her past or to try to cross them.
Camerton, North Carolina: self-published, 2021. 681 pages. Trade paperback.