Lifestyle1

By Melissa Mitchell
Melissa@thecarlislemercury.com

Members of the Nicholas County Bookworms read a novel by James Still called River of Earth. The group is finding that it is learning different styles of writing, format, and new things about different parts of Kentucky and the surrounding areas.

James Still was born in 1906 in Alabama, he moved to Knott County, Ky. in 1931 and made it his home until his death in the spring of 2001.

His publishing career spanned 70 years and included the novel River of Earth, story collections such as Pattern Of a Man, children’s books, collections of mountain lore and sayings, poetry collections such as The Wolfpen Poems, and in the mid 1990s, The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life.

James Still’s River of Earth is a portrait of one of Kentucky’s most distinguished and honored writers as well as an introduction to his work. It also gives students insight into the history and culture of the Appalachian region from which that works sprang. The novel River of Earth has become one of the classics of Appalachian literature.

This novel was published in 1940; it is both a poignant and at times heart-breaking look at hard times in the Eastern Kentucky hills and a celebration of the enduring beauty of those hills and courage, faith, and spirit of their people.

The story is seen through eyes of a small boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. As the young narrator grows from childhood into adolescence, he learns about poverty, grief, and the conflicts that can tear families and communities apart, but also about the love that holds them together.

He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its uncertain promise of material prosperity. In his world privation, violence, and death are part of everyday life, accepted and endured. Yet, withal, it is a world of dignity, love, and humor, of natural beauty, which Still evokes in sharp, poetic images.

The Bookworms Club members felt that this book was at times hard to read but enjoyable. The style of writing that was used was from the 1940s and from the mountains. We found that the novel became intriguing to us and helped us to learn new things about the way things were back in the 1940s.

Every one of the members found that they had learned new meanings of some words and were able to understand the ways of the lives of the family in the novel.

I would recommend that everyone should read this novel and send us back your review of the novel. You can pick of the novel, River of Earth by James Still in the library.

The next novel that the club is reading is, Passing for Black The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kid by Wade Hall. Hall lives in Louisville, Kentucky and the novel on Mae Street Kid is about a little girl from Millersburg, Kentucky.