The Girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains

The Girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains is based on the early life of Margaret Hamilton Riggs, a Virginian neglected and abused as a child, who was rescued by her grandparents to live an impoverished but joyful life until she met her abusive husband, who tried to kill her. All of the prime characters were real people, and the major events in the book are true. Margaret was the grandmother of Lisa Anne Turner’s good friend, Twila Brewer. Turner and Brewer worked together as 911 emergency operators, often sitting side by side. Brewer assembled more than eighty pages of notes and anecdotes written by her mother, Ella Mae Riggs Lenz, about her life and the tremulous journey she and her mother Margaret; along with her little brother Andrew Jackson Riggs (aka AJ), made from Virginia to Arizona. The notes detailed Margaret’s desperate efforts to free her innocent brother from jail, her bewildering weeks-long detainment by the FBI, which erroneously thought they had snagged the girlfriend of Pretty Boy Flloyd, and her near drowning at the hands of her husband. Turner expanded from the foundation of those notes to create The Girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains; a novel built from historical facts. The Girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains is an authentic piece of Americana, showing that the bravest of us can salvage meaning from the cruelest circumstances, and survive to prosper and embrace joy.

Lisa Anne Turner, working in partnership with her friend Twila Brewer, has created a fascinating insight on the trauma and triumph of an American woman who is forced to make the choice to leave her family to escape a man who wants to kill her. Turner has worked as a newspaper journalist, winning two awards for her stories pertaining to the Mescalero Apache Tribe and a survivor of the Bosnian War. She is a U.S. Air Force veteran and was one of the first eight women who served as operators in Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile silos in Montana.