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"A Blue Moon in Poorwater is a wonderful,
captivating, involving novel. Ms. Hankla never seems even
tempted to give in to the urge to render her miners and
her mountain folk as 'quaint' or 'folksy.' They are fully
drawn, complicated people with dimensions, and the
central speaker, Dorie, has an unrelenting eye for the
truth of the experience."
-Richard Bausch, author of
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs.America, and All
the Ships at Sea
Cathryn Hankla's first novel is an engaging coming-of-age
story set in the small Appalachian mining town of Poorwater,
Virginia. It is the summer of 1968, and the narrator,
inquisitive ten-year-old Dorie Parks, is getting ready to
enter fifth grade when her errant older brother Willie
returns to town. A religious fanatic and suspected drug
user, Willie represents to the residents of Poorwater the
hippie counterculture that threatens their conservative
town, and his return is the catalyst for a string of strange
and sometimes tragic events. Dorie's father, a miner, begins
a dangerous labor rights crusade after a mining accident
leaves a close friend dead. Dorie struggles to understand
the class differences that separate "holler kids" and
trailer park children like herself from her wealthy friend
Betty. Hankla's graceful writing evokes the wonder and
growing sophistication of a young girl on the verge of
adolescence and an unknown future. A Blue Moon in
Poorwater offers a moving yet unsentimental slice of
life in Appalachian, Virginia.
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"It is Hankla's gift to take material that could be mean
and ugly and mine it for beauty, to depict not alienation,
but the cruel and tender binding of family and community
members one to another. Her feet are planted firmly in the
mountains of Appalachia. . . . Hankla's novel is a book to
haunt long after it is finished."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
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