Jen: What inspired your new release, THE TOBACCO WIVES? Adele: As a young girl growing up in North Carolina, I was fascinated by my grandmother’s stories about the women she called the tobacco wives. She was a hairdresser for the wives of the wealthiest, most powerful tobacco magnates in Winston-Salem, NC in the 1940s, and tales of these wealthy, glamorous women captured my imagination.   Jen: What’s the most fascinating thing you learned while researching the book? Adele: Insights into what life was like for tobacco workers was fascinating, and pretty disturbing. One example is that the field workers suffered from a condition called “the green monster.” When they tended to and picked wet tobacco leaves, nicotine seeped into their skin, giving them tobacco poisoning. I had no idea about this condition. Factory conditions and practices were also a shocker to me.    Jen: What brings Maddie Sykes to Bright Leaf, North Carolina? Adele: When Maddie’s father is killed in WWII, her mother has a breakdown. She doesn’t know how she’ll support herself and her daughter and decides to take Maddie to her Aunt Etta’s house in the tobacco capital of the South. Aunt Etta is a professional seamstress in the…

CHAPTER ONE My mother woke me in the dead of night again. I felt her standing over my bed, the heat of a flashlight on my face. Why couldn’t she just turn on the lights like a normal person? After sundown, we lived in darkness. If the lamps were on, people could see inside, she said. “Maddie, wake up. We’re going for a drive. Just put your coat on over your nightgown.” I tried to wake up, but stay asleep too, fighting with myself in some in-between place. She paced back and forth, whispering under her breath like she was arguing with an imaginary someone. I wondered what it was this time. But whatever she had planned, nothing could be worse than what had happened last Sunday. On that terrible night, Momma pulled me from my bed at 4 a.m.   “Get up, and come with me,” she’d said, her green eyes wild. She rushed me onto my feet, the wood floor cool and in need of sweeping, gritty under my toes. “I need your help.” I still had a thumbprint bruise on my arm where she grabbed me in that moment, dragging me into the living room. I thought…