The Steep and Thorny Way

The Steep and Thorny Way is a young adult historical novel by Cat Winters, published in 2016 and set in rural Oregon in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan had a substantial following in the state.

Hanalee Denney is sixteen, biracial and accustomed to the way her town treats her, which is not kindly and not subtle. Her father is dead, struck by a car driven by a young man the community has decided to protect, and the official version of events has never accounted for much of what she remembers. Hanalee wants the truth, and she has an unexpected source for it: her father's ghost, who tells a story that contradicts what the town believes. Pursuing it means asking questions of people who would rather she kept quiet, in a district where the Klan is organised and where being difficult is genuinely dangerous.

Winters builds the novel on Hamlet, with a wronged parent, an untrustworthy older man and a daughter who has to decide what revenge is worth, and she keeps the racial violence of the period in view rather than offstage.