The River Nymph — Anne Lovett

A runaway girl, a flapper with a camera, a Valentino with secrets-- and a bad time to fall in love.On a disastrous August night in 1924, 14-year-old Tenny Chance flees from a sharecropper's shack on a Georgia plantation, determined to find her brother and a job in order to save her family from the landlord's exploitation. Two days later, 17-year-old flapper Augusta Pemberton and her cousin Pete photograph Tenny bathing in the Ocmulgee River on her way to Ashbyville. While Pete dreams of the river girl, Tenny and Gussie chase dreams of independence and fulfillment--in Tenny's case, to become a respectable nurse, in Gussie's, to leave Ashbyville for New York, where jazz and fun rule, to sell her photographs to magazines. But smooth talker Ned Fletcher will stop at nothing to achieve riches and revenge, catching Gussie, Tenny, and Pete in his web of deceit. From Jubal Chance's 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 take roller-coaster journeys as they struggle against evil men, mean girls, busybodies, lechers, and even gangsters to achieve their dreams of love and success. .