Book Review: Ghost on Black Mountain

Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain was our book club pick for October. Our book club usually runs 25% discussion about the book and 75% general chatting about other things, but Ghost on Black Mountain generated quite a lot of book talk. And, amazingly, for we are a diverse group of readers, we all loved the novel.

The novel begins with Nellie, a 17-year-old Appalachian girl who falls in love with the wrong guy, Hobbs Pritchard. He sweeps her away from her mother and the only home she's ever known and takes her way up the mountain. She quickly discovers that he is Black Mountain's resident tyrant, hated and feared by everyone. Left alone in their big house while Hobbs goes off to do his dirty work, Nellie begins encountering ghosts who seem to want to warn her, not harm her.

Nellie is a sweet, likeable girl married to pure evil; fortunately, the people on Black Mountain, although suspicious of her at first, realize this and rally around her eventually. But I can't reveal any of that part of the story without spoilers.

The second part of the book is told from various POVs, including Nellie's mother and Hobbs's girlfriend. Nellie comes back at the end to tell the rest of her story—and her daughter's story. The novel is filled with all kinds of twists, sprinklings of Appalachian folklore and traditions, rich characters, and lyrical storytelling.

With this novel, Ann Hite joins Amy Greene (Bloodroot) and Sharyn McCrumb (She Walks These Hills) as a distinctive Appalachian voice, one who can flawlessly weave together ghosts, folklore, and everyday characters in a book that the reader just doesn't want to put down. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Nowhere but Home

I loved Liza Palmer's Conversations with the Fat Girl and liked her More Like Her, so I was excited to get a chance to review Nowhere but Home (published by William Morrow 2013).  I like coming home tales, ones that challenge the "you can't go home again" conversation.

In this novel, Texan-turned-Yankee Queenie Wake is fired from her chef's job once again, and she finally admits a sort of defeat and heads back to her tiny Texas town. She's the daughter of the town's deceased tramp, who bestowed upon her the unfortunate name, Queen Elizabeth. She and her sister—the mother of the town's quarterback— have always been considered the city's trash. But she's been gone for a decade, and Queenie realizes that she doesn't have to accept that title anymore.

The novel takes a fascinating twist as Queenie accepts a job at the local prison, cooking last meals for death-row inmates. I found this part of the novel particularly intriguing. I never considered that this  is actually a job, and yet it must be fulfilled. I appreciated Palmer's thoughtful and insightful treatment of both Queenie, the inmates, and the prison staff.

Besides the coming-home theme and the wonderful look into last meals, Palmer includes a satisfying romance. As one might predict, the daughter of the town tramp and the son of the town's richest family once had a secret and powerful romance.  The are bound to meet up again, and their story unfolds bit by bit.

I think what I loved the most about this novel, besides the death-row parts, was the unraveling of all of Queenie's assumptions. She realizes in the course of the novel that she didn't always know the whole story and that many of her decisions and choices were based on only partial information. This is generally true for all of us, of course, but I enjoyed watching a character have "a-ha!" moments, moments of redemption.

Palmer is funny, insightful, and a great writer of dialogue. Highly recommended!

Book Review: Autobiography of Us

This debut novel by Aria Beth Sloss tells the story of a lifelong friendship that probably should have been ditched in college. One friend is independent, the other is clingy and needy. The setting: California in the 1960s, and, yes, it is just as stereotypical as all those 60s images floating in your head right now. I believe the main character even hangs out in Haight-Ashbury at some point in the novel.

But still, I read the whole novel, and I have gotten to the point in my life that I will toss aside novels that feel like a complete waste of time. Sloss writes well, but she tried to cram way too much into this novel. The characters were really quite defined in themselves, but their relationships were not clear. Why were these women even friends ever? She skipped over that whole part mostly. I needed their friendship to have a more solid foundation in order to justify such a relationship that one's whole life revolves around. The motivations were unclear. I ended the novel feeling like I missed something—the essence of the story was lost. Everyone was just too depressing and resigned without any clear reasons. I want some kind of resolution in a novel, some redeeming quality. 

I always feel apologetic when I give a negative review, so let me end on a positive note: Aria Beth Sloss has it in her to write a fantastic novel, and even now she's published a novel that a lot of people really like, according to the amazon reviews.

Book Review: State of Wonder

It was my lucky day when I found Ann Patchett's State of Wonder at a thrift store. I've had this on my reading list for a year—who would donate it to a thrift store? This book should be passed from friend to friend with a strong "you MUST read this!"

The story opens when pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh gets the cryptic news that her colleague and friend, Anders, died of a fever while trying to find a fellow researcher who's gone AWOL in the Amazon. Now Marina must take Anders' place, trying to find the elusive Dr. Swenson, who has spent years on the Amazon perfecting a drug that will allow women to continue having children into old age. Mr. Fox, CEO of the pharmaceutical company that is fully financing the project, wants Dr. Swenson to hold up her end of the deal.

Once in the Amazon and among the Lakashi people, Marina adjusts admirably and is approved of by the elusive, sometimes brutal Dr. Swenson. The secret fertility "drug" of the Lakashi people is revealed, and Marina understands that she can never report the truth back to Mr. Fox.

And that's really all I can reveal about the plot. Patchett's writing is beautiful. Her description of the Amazon and life in the tribe is fantastic. She is a beautiful, lyrical writer. I've read reviews that criticize Patchett's lack of expertise in the medical and pharmaceutical field, but I didn't care one bit. I thought the story whole plausible and beautifully written.

Book Review: And the Mountains Echoed

I was thrilled to get my hands on Khaled Hosseini's newest novel last week. I loved The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in the way that one can love incredibly sad books. Hosseini's third novel does not disappoint. This is the kind of book that, when I at last finished and put it down, I just sat on the couch thinking about it, remembering characters and stories and how they all tied together.

This incredible novel follows many paths, characters wind in and out, sometimes barely linked but always going back to the theme of family, home, sacrifice, loss, and redemption. The novel starts with Pari and her big brother Abdullah on a journey with their father. The siblings have an unusually strong bond, and an early twist in the novel leaves the reader feeling the sting of their separation.

From there, the stories follow various characters who are somehow linked to Pari and Abdullah, and we return to Pari and Abdullah several times as well. These are characters who make both terrible and wonderful choices, who struggle and fail—or succeed, who find love or lose love, who find a place to call home or lose home, who break bonds and sometimes forge new, stronger ones. Hosseini is a master storyteller, a poet, an artist of the finest degree. I could have read 800 more pages of this novel if Hosseini had written them and never tired of the stories. And yet I was completely satisfied when I finished, even though not all the endings were happy by far.

As with Hosseini's other novels, much of the narrative takes place in Kabul, but the setting isn't as critical to this novel. Still, the Afghanistan landscape and culture, its poverty and violence, play significantly into most of the stories. This novel is full of loss but it's much less tragic than the other two novels. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Bloom

Kelle Hampton of Enjoying the Small Things had everything ready for her new baby girl, down to party favors for delivery room visitors and a chalkboard sign ready at home welcoming the baby to their perfect American family: two half-brothers and a sister already at home.

What never entered Kelle's mind is that Nella Cordelia might not be who Kelle thought she would be—something she knew intuitively the minute Nella was placed in her arms. In this memoir, Kelle takes us through her journey from the moment she realized Nella had Down syndrome through their first year together: a year filled with heartache, acceptance, incredible joy, and a more accurate definition of perfection.

Kelle is an upbeat, young, hip mom. She wears cute clothes and makes party favors for delivery room visitors. (People do that?) The last thing she would have imagined is that her daughter isn't…"perfect." This is not what she signed up for; this does not fit her dreams. Kelle is honest about her initial disappointment. She never glosses over the shock of being told her baby has Down syndrome. She admits the terrible burden of guilt of wishing Nella were someone else. I think that must be really hard to do, knowing you are going to have critical readers who call you a selfish person.

This memoir isn't so much about Nella; it is almost entirely about Kelle's personal journey. I admit that I skipped large portions of the second half of the book because it seemed redundant, and I didn't need to know all the organizations she'd spoken to, parties she had attended, etc. Kelle is less of a lyrical memoir writer and more Pioneer-Womanish, so if you like a hip, sometimes flippant and less poetic style, this is a great memoir to read.

Book Review: A Land More Kind Than Home

The front cover declares this novel by Wiley Cash "as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird." And so of course, because I love both of those authors—Harper Lee much more than McCarthy—I was intrigued.

And if that comparison wasn't enough, the novel has snake handlers, and I am fascinated and repulsed by the notion of snake-handling churches. I read Fred Brown's nonfiction The Serpent Handlers several years ago, so I had a basic understanding of the whys and hows of the snake-handling tradition.

This is the story of nine-year-old Jess and how his family fell apart—how he lost everything at the hands of one evil man, disguised as a pastor. It's also the story of love gone awry, selfishness and sacrifice, children lost, revenge and forgiveness, and redemption.

The story unfolds through three voices: Adelaide, the town's midwife who knows children shouldn't watching adults handling writing serpents; Jess, the fierce protector of his older brother, Stump, who can't speak for himself; and Clem, the sheriff who can't prevent tragic outcomes. The center of all the evil is Pastor Chambliss, a low-life crook who is charismatic enough to seduce a whole congregation into snake-handling—and covering up his mistakes.

There are a lot of "how coulds" in this novel: how could Jess's mother…, how could his father…, how could all these people… —but I can't spoil the novel by investigating those specifically. The question really is: what is lost inside a person that makes them follow a single person so blindly?

It's a tragic book, really, but so beautifully written. The reader wants to best for nearly everyone who is left at the end, and I can't say I like to think about how Jess will turn out as an adult. If Cash writes a sequel, I'd snatch it up in a second.

Highly recommended. Cash is a fantastic writer and storyteller. There was nothing distracting about this novel, and I could have read twice as much of it. I also recommend Brown's book The Serpent Handlers alongside Cash's novel. This is our book club's choice for next month, so I look forward to the discussion and reactions.

Linked up at Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books