Two Sides of the Mountains
In Annaliese From Off, South Carolina author Lindy Keane Carter tells the story of Annaliese Stregal, a wife and mother from Louisville, Kentucky, whose life changes drastically when her husband demands she live with him at a lumber camp in northern Georgia.
The year is 1900. In this remote region, Annaliese faces an attack by a mountain lion, angry moonshiners, suspicious townspeople, and a host of physical hardships. Her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior only makes these primitive living conditions even harsher.
Carter develops her characters well, particularly Annaliese, her sister-in-law Lucenia, and Ruth, a recently married local woman who is hired to help Annaliese. When the Stregals first arrive in the remote logging camp, Annaliese despises Lucenia for her candid and often cynical comments, but over time the two women become friends in the face of mutual adversity.
What is especially fine about this novel are the descriptions of everyday life in this region in the early part of the 20th century. Clearly, Carter has taken great pains to research both the area and its people, giving us details ranging from woodstove cookery to the gardens of the day. Reading Annaliese From Off imparts a real feel for a way of life that has vanished only in the last hundred years.
Meanwhile, Where All Light Tends To Go is as different from Annaliese From Off as that woodstove is from a microwave. Here North Carolina author David Joy takes readers on a gruesome trip into an Appalachian hell of drugs, broken families, and smashed dreams.
Jacob McNeely, a high school dropout living near Cashiers, North Carolina, faces a boatload of troubles. The father he loved as a child now operates a drug ring, his mother is an addict hovering on the brink of madness and death, and the girl he loves, Maggie, has graduated and is about to leave him to go off to college in the eastern part of the state.
When his father orders him to murder a suspected informant, Jacob arrives at “the camp” to find two of his father’s men torturing the informant, burning him with cigarettes, then splashing him with acid, and finally stabbing him. They drag his body out of the camp on a tarp and pitch it over a cliff.
But they haven’t killed the snitch. He’s still breathing when a man searching for a stray dog finds him.
From that point, the violence spirals out of control, and Jacob finds himself torn between obeying the dictates of his criminal father and leaving with Maggie in search of a new beginning. In his presentation of this conflict, Joy vividly shows us Jacob’s interior battle as he struggles to break free of his family and follow his dreams. At one point, he tells Maggie, “You’re going to head off to college and make something out of yourself, and what you’re going to become won’t have a reason in the world to ever come back here.” When he speaks these words—and he says them frequently to Maggie—it’s clear that Jacob hopes to escape as well.
Where All Light Tends To Go is a gritty, brutal novel about hope and vision breaking up against harsh realities.
Back Home in Mitford
After nearly a decade, Jan Karon returns to her popular Mitford series in Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good.
In this tenth novel centered on Mitford—an imaginary town in Western North Carolina, said to be modeled after Blowing Rock, where Karon previously lived—Father Tim Kavanagh and his wife, Cynthia, return home after a trip to Ireland. Retired for five years from his post as the Episcopal priest at Lord’s Chapel, Father Tim finds himself caught up again in the town’s daily life and attendant problems. Here are the characters from previous novels: Dooley, the Kavanagh’s adopted son struggling to become a country veterinarian; Hope Murphy, owner of Happy Endings bookstore, facing the possible loss of her unborn child; and all the others familiar to readers of this series.
The Mitford novels are not for everyone. Karon’s great talent lies in presenting us with the details of living and our daily triumphs and disasters. It’s this quality—her exploration of day-to-day adventures and mishaps in a small town—that has won for her millions of readers. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2014, 511 pages, $27.95)