Christine Holly is a small-town girl from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, raised in a conservative home in a family deeply affected by the death of her sister at a young age. She meets and falls in love with a younger man, an Oklahoma farm boy whose prominent family owns substantial land and oil wells. She marries, CJ, her “Prince Farming,” and moves to the Plains to become a devoted farm wife. Her fantasies of an all-American agrarian life soon become nightmares when she discovers her new relatives are not the wholesome crowd she perceived. She finds herself thrust into a twisted drama of dysfunction, aberration, and shocking revelations that make her question her future—and her own sanity. In Crude Awakening, Holly narrates a fictionalized account of her experiences as she’s extracted from her staid and stable environs and moves into a crazy and chaotic environment with her new family. She tells of mustering the courage to leave her marriage and her dreams behind. Christine Holly now lives along the Chesapeake bay, where she is building her career in the beauty industry.