The Great Blue Hills of God

The Great Blue Hills of God is the powerful, resilient memoir by the creative force behind legendary, award-winning farm-to-table resort, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee. Born with the gift of hospitality," Kreis Beall helped create one of the South's most enchanting destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the entertaining and design world and on the glossy pages of popular shelter magazines. But beautiful exteriors and glowing accolades papered-over deep inner pain. At the pinnacle of her success, a brain injury left her with devastating hearing loss; that was followed by the collapse of her 36 year marriage to her "best friend and business partner," Sandy Beall, and a few years later, the tragic death of her grown son and proprietor of Blackberry Farm, Sam, at age 39. Alone and desolate as her marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey, to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her exterior life and work, now she must begin the hardest undertaking of all: to reclaim her interior life and soul. Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into a dimly lit 300 square foot shed with peeling paint walls, "where I met myself for the first time." Out of brokenness has come reflection, re-examination, and bit-by-bit, healing and meaning. By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, warm, and funny, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who has ever searched to find genuine beauty among their own flaws and scars"--