Seventeen-year-old Julie Harmon is no stranger to hard manual labor, especially after the death of her father, leaving her the main support for her mother and sisters in their remote mountain home. So when Hank asks her to marry him, she thinks any life they build together will be easy by comparison.

Within weeks, Julie learns just how much hardship the two will have to face in order to make it day to day. Deaths, natural disasters and mean-spirited opportunists combine in such formidable force that the young couple is almost beaten before they've started.

In times like these, Julie and Hank often wonder what it's all worth...but with time, they learn just how much they do need and love one another, and the fledgling life together they're nourishing.

Read this a while back. The book is about a young couple whose lives are filled with poverty, loss and a series of misfortunes. You feel for Julie and the hardwork she does every day and grow to root for her even when she does some foolish things (won't say what). It also shows that love can endure the most difficult periods in one's life. Overall, it was a well-told story, well written.

In general, I usually do not buy "Oprah" books since most of them are "downers" featuring disfunctional families or folks with so many problems you come away from the read in need of Prozac. I thought I would attempt one last Oprah book. Unfortunately, it was Gap Creek! Just how may bad things can happen to one character? This novel is permeated with detailed descriptions of difficult and unpleasant chores performed by Julie, the main character, interwoven with the unrelenting and excruciating anguish she experiences. Granted, the story begins in the last year of the nineteenth century when life was harder and survival required strong will and tenacity but this woman deserves nothing less than a Congressional Medal of Honor. The men she encounters (including her husband) are boorish and insensitive and the finite emotional nourishment she receives comes from other women. Perhaps the author meant the story to be inspirational, but I found it thoroughly depressing.

Just reading this book is enough to wear a person out. Hog killing does not rank high on my priority list, but if you want to know how to kill a hog, render lard, milk a cow, shuck corn and pluck the feathers from a turkey, this book is for you. Believe me, my head was spinning and my exhaustion level escalated to the roof by the time I reached the end of this book. Initially, the story is about a marriage - Julie and Hank's, but it might best be described as a farmer's handbook.

The only interesting character in the book was the local drunk, Tommy Gosnell, who at least got my attention every time he hollered, "Piieendergaasss," (Mr. Pendergast) the owner of the home in which Julie and Hank's reside. Unfortunately, unknown to Tommy, Mr Pendergast has met his untimely demise and Julie and Frank's future in the home is uncertain.

Apart from page after page of the dynamics of farming and listing to Julie moan and groan about a woman's work never being done, the dialect and writing style just about drove me to holding the book over the end of my nifty Bic lighter and setting it aflame. The author seemed to be sending a message that read like a grade one reader,"Look at Julie, see Julie work, watch Julie milk a cow," thereby, implying that the rest of the female gender does nothing all day long but sit around on their butts sipping tea and munching on dainty cucumber finger sandwiches. The book is okay to a point, but I cannot for the life of me understand how it made Oprah's list. If she has, in fact, read the book, she will certainly know how to slaughter a hog and scrub the grits from the kitchen floor.

I loved this book. It is a gritty, realistic, gross, funny, touching, and loving look at the relationship between a young couple set against a harsh timeperiod. This should be a pre-marital must read for all young women who think that marriage should be all wine and roses! Might even cut down on the divorce rate!! :-) If Julie can stay with her husband and keep her head on with all she had to endure surely we can put up with dirty socks, hair in the sink, and too much time at the office!! Julie is a survivor through and through and I think that we can all find some of her in ourselves -- the courage to do what has to be done and to be happy with what we are given and where we are planted.