The River Nymph

A disastrous August night in 1924 Georgia forces 14-year-old Tenny Chance to flee from her sharecropper's shack to find her brother and a job to save her family from the landlord's exploitation. When 17-year-old flapper Augusta Pemberton and her cousin Pete Godwin photograph Tenny bathing in the Ocmulgee River on her way to Ashbyville, they don’t realize the meaning this photograph will bring to the collision of their lives. 

Tenny and Gussie chase dreams of independence  and fulfillment--in Tenny's case, to become a respectable nurse, in Gussie's, to leave Ashbyville and go to New York, where jazz and fun rule, to sell her photographs to magazines.  Enter smooth talker Ned Fletcher, who manages to wreak havoc for both, in very different ways.

Anne Lovett's well-researched third novel takes us from Jubal Chance's bare-wood shack to Judge Pemberton's comfortable brick house, from struggling cotton mill workers to the local hospital's nursing school, from Essie Swift Female Institute to high-rolling Havana. 

Tenny and Gussie learn from each other as they take spirited roller-coaster journeys as each struggles with tradition and fate to achieve her dreams of love and success.