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Appalachian Mountain Girl
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About the BookThis is the story of the Bailey family’s escape from the grueling Corbin Glow mines in 1930 to find a better life in Letcher, Kentucky—“the prettiest place in the world.” Rhoda Warren’s account is three dimensional: with humor and warmth—but without sentimentality—she recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and “family values” buttressed and sustained them. Among others, we meet Kin, who saddened his neighbors with songs of the old “Southland”; Lie Shingles, a man without a home of his own who traveled from neighbor to neighbor as an honored guest at mealtime; Gideon, a preacher without formal training, who heeded a call from God to come to Letcher and to relieve the people’s despair; and Cindy, a “Doctor Woman” and artist accused of witchcraft by the local minister. As a young girl, Rhoda begins to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog—to her these things seemed “visions of a fairy world.” And at school, she is learning newer, better ways to do the things her parents had been doing for years. When Rhoda marries and moves to a small town in New York State, it seems that her dreams of a better life have been realized. Yet scenes of Letcher always “hovered in the backroads of her memory.” When she revisits her homeland, this time as a “New Yorker,” Rhoda finds that Letcher is no longer the place of her memories. Reviews“Affecting and well-written . . . a particularly telling example of the adage that you can’t go home again.”—Kirkus Reviews "Warren's recollections of her Appalachian childhood are as refreshing as a mountain stream."––Christian Science Monitor "Warren's detailed prose lifts this memoir above the expected chronicle of everyday grime and the threat of danger."––Chicago Tribune |
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