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Even As We Breathe introduces the reader to twenty-year-old Cowney Sequoyah and the mountains of western North Carolina during the summer of 1942. Cowney is spending the season as an undervalued member of the Grove Park Inns grounds crew. The inn is currently home to Axis diplomats and their families being held as prisoners of war. Cowney struggles to balance the often coEven As We Breathe introduces the reader to twenty-year-old Cowney Sequoyah and the mountains of western North Carolina during the summer of 1942. Cowney is spending the season as an undervalued member of the Grove Park Inns grounds crew. The inn is currently home to Axis diplomats and their families being held as prisoners of war. Cowney struggles to balance the often conflicting worlds of life at home on the Qualla Boundary (Cherokee Indian Reservation) where a Capuchin monkey roams the woods at will and mysterious forest fires loom with life at the inn where foreign diplomats quietly negotiate backdoor deals and a secret room provides the rare opportunity for Cowney and Essie (his enigmatic carpool companion) to construct their own world views. Bud Cowneys uncle offers the only true glimpse into Cowneys past before his parents died but Buds own demons threaten to upend Cowneys peace with the past and compromise any hope for a future free from the consequences of his familys choices. When a diplomats young daughter goes missing at the inn Cowney finds himself in the center of suspicion and betrayal.Cowneys experience is an examination of race and class tangled in a microcosm of the secluded inn. His story asks the reader to consider the tropes of American imprisonment and our role as both prisoners and imprisoners. Cowney finally comes to reason that all three natural elements that cause so many problems in life (bones blood and skin color) will not be what remain of humankind in the end. Only the human spirit can be passed on wholly to the next generation.(less)