This coming-of-age story is well-rooted in nature, community, and music.
In this novel set in 1975, a young woman moves back to her Appalachian home and tries to stop the building of a dam.
Grace Dabney McAuley, 17, is about to finish high school when she learns she inherited her father’s farm in Jack Creek, Virginia, where she’d grown up, after he died seven years ago. Aunt Ruby has been living there, but she couldn’t manage the place after breaking her leg. When Grace arrives, she halts an estate sale—arranged by her stepfather—already in progress and agrees to stay on, finish high school by mail, and take care of Ruby and the farm, with all its chores. Her mother says she’s “being foolish, absolutely daft,” but Grace decides to trust her intuition. She learns that a hydroelectric dam project threatens to flood the sparsely populated and hard-to-reach mountain valley; it would also flood her father’s grave. Getting back in touch with her roots, especially mountain music, and meeting Sam Bennett—an older Quaker boy looking for endangered riverine species—inspires her to organize the Jack Creek residents, fight the dam, and effectively describe the valley’s beauty in song. Schmidt (Salt Runs in My Blood, 2015, etc.) evokes great affection for the people, customs, music, and arts of Appalachia. Though this portrait of Appalachia could slide into sentimentality, Schmidt also acknowledges the region’s hardships, lack of education, and racism. Bringing a Melungeon friend to a fiddlers’ convention, Grace finds and tears down “a hand-lettered paper sign” on the shower house reading “Whites Only.” Grace’s examination of both sides of her family—Appalachian and Richmond’s high society—is well-handled, as is her growing interest in Quaker spirituality. Schmidt also does a nice job of tying Grace’s romantic, environmental, and religious searchings into her feelings about her father’s death and fears of abandonment. Despite dramatic events and touches of humor, the book can become somewhat earnest and didactic, undercutting its emotion.
This coming-of-age story is well-rooted in nature, community, and music.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0986383519
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Kakapo Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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