The Huckleberry Queen By Aaron Helman

She ruled a kingdom with a whip and a pistol. History almost forgot her name.

In the 1870s, a wild marsh sprawled across northern Indiana — wet, lawless ground that respectable people wanted drained and gone. But every summer it grew something money couldn't grow anywhere else: huckleberries. And where there was money, there were people. Pickers. Tramps. Thieves. A whole seasonal kingdom that rose out of the mud each June and dwindled away each fall.

That kingdom had a queen.

They called her the Huckleberry Queen, and she ran the marsh with a whip on her hip and a pistol beside it, settling disputes, paying her pickers, and keeping order in a place the law wouldn't touch. Newspapers a thousand miles away wrote about her. Then she disappeared along the with marsh and the pickers who made it famous.

The Huckleberry Queen is the novel that brings her back.

Told through the eyes of a drifter and the young daughter who follows him into the marsh — a girl who still believes storybooks might be real — it's a story about the last wild places, the people who ruled them, and what it costs when civilization decides they can't be allowed to exist.

Find Helman’s books and novels at aaronhelman.com