Linekeeper

When a woman returns to her Smoky Mountains hometown, she finds an old math waking in the hollers—one that tallies breath, names, and debt. A polite man with a clipboard calls it policy. The mountain's older voice calls it balance due. Either way, the counting has teeth, and first frost is the deadline. Armed with a bell, four nails, a spool of red thread, and the stubborn rules her grandmother left behind, the narrator learns how to "make a room a job": kitchens hold names, bridges take tolls not tithes, ledgers keep sums—never souls. With Hallie the town pastor, Rebecca at the post office, Bonnie at the bank, and a quiet drifter named Lucan whose shadow doesn't always match him, she turns back small hungers—at the school, the clinic, the mine, the waterworks—before the Reckoner on the ridge comes for the town all at once. As frost creeps down the slopes and the County's "courtesy audits" become boundary walks and porch checks, the fight narrows to a few clean sentences and a table set in the middle of Main Street: tolls, not tithes; no breath in ledgers; bells speak when counting tries to. If they can teach every room its right work—and keep Lucan from being counted to three—the town might make it through winter with its names still its own. Rooted in Appalachian folklore and everyday magic, Linekeeper is a fierce, tender novel about community, boundaries, and the small, correct acts that hold the line. Perfect for readers of Maggie Stiefvater, Naomi Novik, and anyone who likes their fantasy with stubborn hope, found family, and a little salt on the threshold. Themes and vibes: contemporary mountain fantasy, hopepunk, found family, quiet romance, folk rules that bite back, counting-as-magic, kitchens and bells, towns that decide together to live.