Something in common

It's wonderful when a man and a woman discover they have something in common. What Delwood Reese and Rae Lynn Cobb have in common in Donna Everhart's 2022 novel The Saints of Swallow Hill is very uncommon: They both have out-of-body experiences. They are dead, but then alive again with incredible stories to tell, though they both hesitate to tell them.

Set in Georgia in 1932, the Depression well under way and jobs hard to find, Del is a womanizing young man who has a relationship with the wrong man's wife. That man is his boss, who in revenge gives Del the dangerous job of climbing inside a grain bin to break up the corn inside. But then his boss opens the door at the bottom of the bin, letting the corn run out and causing Del to get buried. Later he can remember watching other men trying to rescue him, even though his unconscious body is buried in corn.

Now having lost his interest in women, becoming the first of our saints, he ends up working on a turpentine farm with a boss even more savage than his previous one. Any man Crow doesn't like and or who he doesn't think is working hard enough he puts in a small sweat box for days at a time. Del is one of these victims, though he manages to survive, unlike some others.

Meanwhile Rae Lynn Cobb kills her badly injured husband in a desperate act of mercy, then flees to Georgia and that same turpentine farm, where she gets a job by pretending to be a man named Ray Cobb. She can't keep up with the men and is placed in the sweat box for three days, where she has her own out-of-body experience. 

Finally released and barely alive, she is discovered to be a woman. Cornelia, the abused wife of the storekeeper, brings her back to life and gives her a place in the store, against her husband's wishes.

The relationship between these two characters takes the entire novel to develop, through many hardships, all of which make it sweet and believable, the miracles notwithstanding.