A Good Story Full of Treasures

In her 2014 Annaliese From Off, novelist and journalist Lindy Keane Carter introduced readers to Annaliese Stregal, a young wife and mother who follows her ambitious husband away from a comfortable life in Louisville, Kentucky, to the hills of North Georgia. 

The year is 1900, and attorney John Stregal and his brother have purchased 17,000 acres of woodland, which they intend to chop down and mill into lumber to feed the ravenous American appetite for timber. Outlanders in this strange, crude land with its wild animals and backwoods inhabitants, both Annaliese and John undergo many trials, ordeals that test their marriage and eventually bring disaster.

In her sequel to this novel, Annaliese Sound and True, Carter drops us back into the life of this woman whose tribulations are in some ways only just beginning. Her husband has died violently, her in-laws are both dead, and she is the sole proprietor of the logging business. The baby she carries is born with a cleft lip and a cleft pallet, which in those days often meant a death sentence from starvation for a newborn. Aware of her now-deceased husband’s penchant for sexual assault, she discovers the depths of that philandering when a woman, Olive, pays her a visit with news that she too had sexual relations with John. Meanwhile, Annaliese must decide what to do with the logging business and the vast acreage of timber she now owns, parts of which other loggers are illegally harvesting.

In her various battles to keep her little girl alive, raise her other daughter and son, deal with her husband’s past, and manage her immense and beloved forests, Annaliese has several allies. Henry Chastain, a local attorney who is clearly much in love with Annaliese, comes again and again to her aid, standing beside her, for example, when she confronts the timber thieves. Neighbor Ruth Simmons, whose child may be the result of John Stregal’s sexual attack, works for Annaliese and eventually becomes a best friend and confidante. Annaliese’s sister, Dorothy, and her husband Phillip come from Louisville to help care for the baby girl and offer Annaliese emotional support.

In addition to being a good story, Annaliese Sound and True offers readers other treasures as well. 

Carter sets her novel in that time when unregulated lumber companies were devastating the Appalachians. Here is an impression given us by one of these exploiters, a liar and cheat named Dawson, and Annaliese’s enemy. He crests a ridge and pulls a pair of binoculars from his pack. “Waves of butchered land rolled away for as far as he could see. Stumps as wide as wagons dotted the hillside, fresh stumps, still bleached and creamy. Poplars, he thought. Young trees stood broken and bent into sure death. Jagged limbs lay strewn across the land upon which they had cast their shade.”

Some of these logging magnates—Annaliese is one of them—recognize the immense damage done to the environment by such indiscriminate practices. Enraged by this carnage and determined to discover a better method for using the forests, Annaliese writes to Carl Schenck of the Biltmore Forest School in Asheville, North Carolina. She has heard about Schenck’s “application of European scientific principles of forestry in America, specifically in Mr. George Vanderbilt’s woodlands at his Biltmore estate.” She asks him to send one of his graduates to help better manage her woodlands. Soon one of Schenck’s young forestry students, Caleb Boone, arrives, and the two get down to work to save parts of the forest, repopulate barren areas with trees, and restore fish to the streams by means of hatcheries. Some of her colleagues are won over by her example, and begin their own projects of reforestation. 

In Annaliese herself, Carter also gives her readers a fine example of the ways our adversities and obstacles can shape us and make us stronger. Like those grinders used to polish gems, the trials Annaliese confronts transform her from the woman we meet in the beginning of the book—”She couldn’t go back to Louisville. So many messes he’d left for her to clean up. So many reasons to scream.”—to a devoted mother, ardent lover, and skilled business owner who now believes that “scars were a sign of having come out on the other side of something.” 

Finally, Annaliese Sound and True realistically depicts the tangle of obligations, desires, and hardships most human adults face. Annaliese finds herself forced time and again to juggle her work, her growing affections for Henry, and the demands of her children, particularly the sickly baby. Her hopes for her children near the end of the book, her son and two daughters, are the aspirations of nearly all parents, that the young people will grow up to seize opportunities and fight their battles while remaining “capable and honest, curious and kind.”

In Man’s Search For Meaning, an account of his days spent in a Nazi concentration camp, Viktor Frankl wrote, “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.”

Annaliese Stregal takes the punches thrown at her by chance and circumstance, keeps her feet, and adds deeper meaning to her life. Annaliese Sound and True serves as a reminder that we can do the same.