1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
“I found this book on a shelf at work, and picked it up on a whim. It is amazing. It is stark yet supple, melancholy and yet sober in its portrayal of emotion, having a style that reminds me of Appalachia, the dirt-poor, mountain house, overgrown lawn Appalachia. It reminds me of working on top of a tin roof in Stearns, Kentucky, of being inside an empty white Kentucky church. The author, C.E. Morgan, a native of Berea herself, has clearly seen and felt and experienced these things, too. The way that everything in the land seems new and distinctly real and is utterly itself, not a symbol for something else. The way that a relationship can be so full of ecstasy and intimacy and yet tinged at the edges with a sense of difference and distance, and how that can ache deeply but be a good ache, and not a bad thing at all; and also the way that this can be normal to a relationship, and conversely the way that this can begin to dissipate into a growing distance which begins to question love itself. The story follows Orren and Aloma, the latter an aspiring pianist who only wants to leave the mountains, the former the son of farming parents who have recently died in a tragic accident. Orren is left to care for the family farm by himself in their rural 1980s Kentucky mountain town, and Aloma comes to help him, to be with him, but cannot seem to break through the barrier of his grief and bereavement. Finally Aloma faces a decision: to follow her inner urges and leave Orren for another man, for another place where things will be easier, or to cleave hard and fast to a man she cannot always understand and a place she will not always find bearable. The plot is deftly and heartbreakingly woven, until it ascends to its final pages, a denouement that is simple and quiet and imperfect, yet beautiful, and painfully real. One of the best works of fiction I've read in a long time. ”
Michael wrote this review Sunday, May 10 2009.
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