Heaven (Casteel Series #1)

In the hill country of West Virginia, life is hard, but it is the only life young Heaven Leigh Casteel has ever known. Through the frigid winter nights, when the wind blows mercilessly through the cracks in the cabin floor, Heaven huddled in an old patched quilt, dreams of college-and of her beautiful, frail mother, who died in childbirth at the age of 14. She determines to someday go to college and to find her mother's family, Boston Brahmins who never learned their daughter's fate. Meanwhile, she must help her step-mother, Sarah, feed ad care for the four other children, for her Pa is a no-good moonshiner who beats and then neglects his family. Heaven seeks and finds refuge in her schoolbooks; in Tom, her beloved half brother and soulmate, and in sweet little Keith and "Our Jane," the youngest Casteel children. Then Sarah, treated too shabbily for too long by her mean-tempered husband, leaves the cabin for good, and Luke Casteel comes up with a monstrous scheme: one by one, he sells his children for $500 apiece! Heaven, her heart already breaking, is sold to a young couple from Atlanta, the wife a pampered brat and her husband with a not-too-fatherly look in his eyes. It is then that Heaven learns how a fancy home in the suburbs can be its own kind of hell, and from the day she knows she'll never rest until her family is together again.

This spellbinding tale follows her incredible ordeal inspired by her indomitable will to survive.