Melanie Jones‘ series is back!  And she is tackling West Virginia this week…  I will start with her pick and then respond with the pick from Mary, one of my readers.  I have visited West Virginia, but only as a child, so I look forward to getting reacquainted with this lovely state, even if only through literature.

Photo by zieak

So, here is Melanie’s pick: Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been.   I have not yet read Pancake’s debut, so here is Melanie’s review:

From the hills of West Virginia comes Ann Pancake’s debut Strange as This Weather Has Been, based on real events and interviews from an Appalachian mining town. Lace See and Jimmy Make fall in love in the era of the Buffalo Creek Disaster. Twenty years later, their family is cut up in a flurry of strip-mining and clear-cutting, with black floods a constant menace and the economy collapsing in on itself. As the parents argue over leaving, their daughter Bant explores her sexuality and allegiances while her three brothers struggle to understand what is happening around them.

Photo by cloudsoup

Weather weaves a stream-of-conscious narrative that never feels one-dimensional—the characters, from passionate Lace to gentle, sensitive Dane, are genuine and endearingly flawed. With her book, Pancake pens a love poem to West Virginia, and also a lament for its ravaged hills: “This place so subtly beautiful and overlaid with doom,” Lace says. “Killed again and again, and each time, the place rising back on its haunches, diminished, but once more alive.”

Even after getting black lung, her father wants to spend his last days out in his woods, where lush vegetation curls around rusted machinery and poisoned mud sludges against yellowroot and dusty sugar maples. As Uncle Mogey puts it, their mountains are different from those out West: “We live in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.” The See family is faced with an impossible choice—to stay would mean witness the land they love die, and to leave would be to betray the love itself.

Photo by ginevra

I must admit, I’m a sucker for rough-hewed mining stories.  I just loved A Coal Miner’s Daughter (wrong state, I know), and a somewhat predictable novel I read in a book club many years ago (and I simply cannot remember the title or author!  Probably because the setting was the best part), but even this apparently forgettable novel stays with me in a visceral way — I can still feel the damp air on my skin.  So, I look forward to checking out Strange As This Weather Has Been in the near future.

Photo by Jimmy Joe

Now, on to my reader’s pick!  I was fortunate enough to get a suggestion from Mary when I posted my list of states and authors a few weeks ago.  Mary’s pick is John O’Brien’s memoir At Home in the Heart of Appalachia.  I found a wonderful review; here’s an except:

In a fashion that its author compares to a camera zooming in for a close-up and panning back for a wide view, John O’Brien’s book At Home in the Heart of Appalachia combines the deeply personal story of a son’s desire to understand the roots of his father’s despair with a broad history of the Appalachian region—which O’Brien ultimately concludes is a mythic land.

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated book opens with an account of O’Brien’s journey to Piedmont on the day his father died. The two men had been estranged for 18 years, and for O’Brien revisiting his father’s boyhood home was a gesture toward marking the older man’s passing.

Memories of previous journeys into Appalachia follow. O’Brien recalls one of many childhood trips from the working-class Philadelphia neighborhood home of his family (which would eventually include 10 children) to Piedmont, where both his parents grew up.

O’Brien also remembers the journey his wife and two children made from Oswego, New York, to their new home in Pendleton County years later.

As the seasons pass in that Franklin home, O’Brien provides vivid descriptions of his adopted state’s beauty, and a series of time-honored rituals unfold before the reader’s eyes: fall cattle sales, deer hunting, spring ramp dinners, summer haymaking, sheep shearing, the Fourth of July parade down Main Street.

The book would be worth reading if only for the short, simple phrases in which O’Brien records the world around him. “The sky is steel gray and the sun is a white blister above the ridge,” he writes in winter. “At dusk, the breeze picks up and it carries the taste and feel of moisture.”

Thanks, Mary!  And, as always, I would love to hear any other suggestions!

And the state capitol is…

Photo by Jim Bowen0306

Charleston!  (By the way — Madison is the capital of Wisconsin… sorry for the oversight last week!) 

 Need to get caught up with this series?

First, from Melanie Jones:

Alabama: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (check out my To Kill A Mockingbird Sample Kit!)

Michigan: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides

Alaska: The Man Who Swam With Beavers by Nancy Lord

Arizona: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

North Dakota: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Vermont: The Secret Historyby Donna Tartt

Hawaii: Heads by Harry by Lois-ann Yamanaka

And I went out on my own for…

Florida: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Nora Zeale Hurston

Minnesota: In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien

Wisconsin: When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton

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