Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachia

I recently bought this little book from Amazon.com. It's a collection of essays about how McCrumb became a storyteller, her family background, the Celts who settled in Appalachia, and her thoughts on writing historical fiction.

I've been a Facebook fan of McCrumb's for a long time and had felt I was really getting to know her that way, but this book told me so much more. Now I feel like I know why she writes the kind of stories she writes; she comes by it naturally since it's a long family tradition. They told stories through songs frequently, and she still uses music to set her mood as she writes. In fact, she does a CD of appropriate music for the setting and the characters and the story before she begins to write. I find this fascinating.

McCrumb takes offense, and rightfully so, that her books are often shelved with mysteries. She doesn't write mysteries, she writes historical fiction that sometimes involves magical realism. Don't know what that is? She explains it beautifully in one of these essays.

Her books, especially the "Ballad" novels, are always best sellers. Now you can read this 65 page book and learn why they are so good and so readable and so much fun to read.

Review: Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb

Recently Sharyn McCrumb posted on her Facebook page that her next novel will be out in August 2011, and suggested that we should read her earlier book Ghost Riders before then. The new book will be about Tom Dooley, of "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley" fame. His lawyer in the real story was Zebulon Vance, who is a major character in Ghost Riders. By the way, Tom's real name was Tom Dula but everyone mispronounced it.

I had a copy of Ghost Riders on my shelf so I have now read it. The characters in this book are some of McCrumb's best work. A few are real, others fictional, but all totally believable and fascinating. Everyone's favorite McCrumb character, Nora Bonesteel, makes a sort of cameo appearance in it, but another character with "the Sight" is one of the main characters. He is called "Rattler" and he is inseparable from the mountains he lives in, the Appalachians of western North Carolina. He's a loner but frequently reenactors of the Civil War camp in the mountains and if he wants some conversation he'll go visit them. Problem is, their uniforms and firing of period weapons seems to be bringing back ghosts of the real war.

In flashback we meet McKesson (Keith) and Malinda Blalock, union sympathizers in a "secesh" area. This is one of the toughest couples you'll ever meet. When he is forced to join the Confederate Army, Malinda dresses like a boy and joins up too as "Sam Blalock." Turns out she's a good soldier and they plan to cross over to the Union army as soon as they can. It's only when her husband is wounded and is to be sent home that she reveals her sex and goes home with him. That isn't the end of their wartime experiences though, far from it.

There are other superbly drawn characters to fill out the story of mountain people divided by a war they have little stock in, the cruelty shown toward the women, children, and old people trying to survive at home while the young men fight and die, and the lingering feuds that result, a la the Hatfields and the McCoys. This is the war I'm interested in rather than battles and generals and tactics so I greatly enjoyed this wonderful story. Above all, the people's sense of belonging to the Appalachians and their knowledge of the mountains prevails.

I highly recommend this book regardless of whether you are a Sharyn McCrumb fan or not. If you aren't, you will be after reading this book.

Sharyn McCrumb is Back with a New Ballad Novel

I was delighted to win this new book from Goodreads and thanks also to St. Martin's Press for sending me to a wonderful audio introduction complete with appropriate music as well as interviews with McCrumb. You can find these at http://us.macmillan.com/thedevilamongstthelawyers.

If, like me, you are a longtime fan of the Ballad novels, you might be disappointed to find that Nora Bonesteel, gifted with The Sight, has only a small role in this book. However, it is a wonderful read with what I think is an important message.

McCrumb is superb at characterization and that's what I enjoyed most about The Devil Amongst the Lawyers. The devil in question is New York reporters who show up in a little mountain town in Virginia for a big murder trial. The local schoolteacher is on trial for murdering her own father. The trial actually happened in 1935 and the story is basically true to what happened, just populated with McCrumb's real-as-life characters.

The main character in the book is Henry Jernigan, a famous reporter. He had spent many years in Japan and that experience plays a role in this story. He and the other reporters have packed their preconceptions for the trip, so much so that they can write their first article on the train before they even arrive. Their mission is to sell newspapers, you see, and the truth doesn't really matter at all to them, especially the fact that instead of hillbilly shacks, etc., what they actually find is normal small-town America. Nora Bonesteel's cousin, a rookie reporter for a small town paper in Tennessee, actually tries to report the truth but that doesn't sell papers. One of the NY reporters says something like the truth is merely whatever you can convince people to believe. Talk about jaded.

I knew early on whodunit, but that isn't really the point anyway. The point is the reporters' coverage of the trial and their superior attitude toward the locals which gets the predictable response. I enjoyed the book but was a little sad that too often 2010 reporting follows the example of what was true in 1935. It's just as hard to know what's true now as it was then.