Emily Carpenter's "Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters"

Emily Carpenter is the bestselling author of Until the Day I Die, Every Single Secret, The Weight of Lies, and Burying the Honeysuckle Girls. A graduate of Auburn University, Carpenter has worked as an actor, producer, screenwriter, and behind-the-scenes soap opera assistant for CBS television. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, she moved to New York City before returning to the South, where she now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her family.

Carpenter's new novel, Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters, is about:

a faith healer’s elusive and haunted past.

Dove Jarrod was a renowned evangelist and faith healer. Only her granddaughter, Eve Candler, knows that Dove was a con artist. In the eight years since Dove’s death, Eve has maintained Dove’s charitable foundation—and her lies. But just as a documentary team wraps up a shoot about the miracle worker, Eve is assaulted by a vengeful stranger intent on exposing what could be Dove’s darkest secret: murder…

Here Carpenter dreamcasts the leads for an adaptation of Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters:

I envisioned Florence Pugh playing both roles of Eve Candler and Dove/Ruth. Several times in the book, people comment about how Eve resembles her grandmother and I love the idea of them being almost identical looking and using it as a connection between the two. As Eve comes to learn more and more about her grandmother Dove, she realizes they are a lot alike - and both have very good reasons for keeping secrets and hiding things from the people they care about.

I think Florence Pugh is one of the most talented actresses out there and, as she did in Little Women, she can play a range of ages so incredibly well.

Visit Emily Carpenter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue