“The hardest work I did on Gap Creek was trying to get the voice right,” says Robert Morgan, who has been called the poet laureate of Appalachia. The voice, as it happens, is of seventeen-year-old Julie Harmon. At seventeen, she’s a good girl, and strong, working as hard as a man alongside her fa...
As the War for Independence wore on into the 1780s, unrest ruled the Carolinas. Settlers who had cleared the land after the Cherokees withdrew were being mustered for battle as British forces pillaged their hard-won farms. Robert Morgan's stunning novel tells a story of two people caught in the c...
Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates THE TRUEST PLEASURE--the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in ...
I listened to this as an audio book, so my experience may be different that that of other readers'.The man and woman (I can't remember their names) did a very good job reading this book. They were engaging, not boring or irritating, and had good Appalachian dialects. 5/5 stars for them.I listened...
Robert Morgan's first novel skillfully weaves Appalachian oral tradition about such things as prowling panthers, outlaws, and marauding Cherokees into a "tale in three parts." The first part centers on Petal Richards, who as a young bride leaves her family to accompany her husband into the mounta...
It was mostly dark inside, but he saw benches in the light from the colored windows. Out of the wind the air was warmer. As Jonah’s eyes adjusted a little, he saw a stove at the side of the church near the altar. He walked toward the front and realized as he neared it that a fire was crackling in...
I had nowhere to stay except in the cave, and I couldn’t stay there another night with the dead bodies. As soon as I woke I added wood to the fire to make it brighter, and then I tried to think what to do. The panther was a big heavy thing, and it was all I could do to rol...
It is an odd fact that those who accomplish the most often spend years fumbling and stumbling to find what it is they can achieve. The first half of a life may be given to experiment, trial and error, failure after failure. If Boone had a sense of his destiny at the time, it was frustrated again ...