Scold's Bridle

Scold's Bridle is a backward-in-time series of short stories depicting the violent oppression, complicity, and participation of white women, exposing individual choices that resulted in the abandonment of sisterhood for survival. The past is not what we are told and, at every turn, religion holds the sharp stick, the torch, or the bridle. Scold's Bridle straddles the line between page-turner and deep narrative.

Main character Rebecca is villainous and predatory, a narcissistic preacher's wife intent on manipulating her husband's success and keeping her daughter Rae Ann in line. She has an unfortunate attraction to Rae Ann's teenage boyfriend, the son of Delfa the faith healer, whose magical powers become apparent as the story unfolds. Tracking the characters back through time, Rebecca is a young mother desperate to escape poverty in Idaho, the "owner" of enslaved people in Mississippi, a starving colonialist in Massachusetts, and a woman with a terrible choice to make in medieval Scotland. It is not what she will do in the future but rather what she has done in the past that corrupts her. Delfa, always the intuitive crone, becomes the main character in the last chapter when Rebecca's betrayal seals the fate of them all. Chapters are each set in a different time and place, beginning in the twenty-first century and ending in the sixteenth century, visiting the three women as they were in that time and place. All events are based on true stories as seen through the eyes and participation of the main characters.