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May 21, 2008 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction

The Giardina novel I reviewed earlier, The Unquiet Earth, is actually a sequel to this one, which covers the years 1890-1922. Both books share the same problem of over-use of bad language (which cost this one a fifth star); but this book does not have several of the other objectionable elements of the second one, and the eye-opening indictment of social injustice here is even more powerful.

This is a fictionalized treatment of the hellish conditions in Appalachia's coal country, during the years The Giardina novel I reviewed earlier, The Unquiet Earth, is actually a sequel to this one, which covers the years 1890-1922. Both books share the same problem of over-use of bad language (which cost this one a fifth star); but this book does not have several of the other objectionable elements of the second one, and the eye-opening indictment of social injustice here is even more powerful.

This is a fictionalized treatment of the hellish conditions in Appalachia's coal country, during the years when the big coal companies were literally stealing the land and establishing a system of de facto slavery in the mines, enforced by murder and the threat of murder, with the active complicity of a corrupt government. But it is not very fictionalized; many of the atrocities (and no, that isn't too strong a term) that Giardina depicts actually happened, although some of the names of people and places are changed here, and some license is taken with details. (The real names are used in the movie Matewan, depicting the 1920 murder of Matewan, West Virginia's mayor by coal company gun thugs in broad daylight on a public street, and the first acts of armed resistance by the citizenry --and though this site is devoted to books, not movies, I'd heartily recommend that movie as well!) And this is not simply dead history irrelevant to the present; as the sequel shows, the peonage and violence area residents have endured at the hands of the coal companies continues into the present. And we can see the same mentality of oppression and exploitation of the many for the enrichment of a few in so much of the warp and woof of economic life in our world today, with its "globalization" of sweatshops, expanding poverty and corporate greed.

To her credit, Giardina doesn't let her message overwhelm her story, or reduce her characters to cardboard caricatures; this is a novel of flesh-and-blood people, not a dreary ideological exercise in "socialist realism." (And of course many of her oppressed characters fighting back against the system are not "reds,' as their opponents depict them, nor in many cases particularly ideological at all.) Of all of her four viewpoint characters, only the Italian immigrant Rosa fails to come alive for the reader --at least, this reader-- her few sections of the book are much shorter than those of the others, and are much more exercises in rather jumbled stream-of-consciousness perceptions (ultimately distorted by madness) than coherent narratives. But the other sections don't have that problem. I also appreciate her basically sympathetic treatment of Christianity; the rebel preacher Albion Freeman is a particularly appealing character, though I disagree with some aspects of his theology (his pacifism, and his theory of ultimate universal salvation --views which probably reflect Episcopal lay preacher Giardina's own). All in all, this is one of the best modern historicals I've read. ...more

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Mar 06, 2008 Lynne rated it it was amazing

Loved this book even more than Unquiet Earth!

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Mar 26, 2013 Emily Sears Cook marked it as to-read

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