The Faster I Walk….. 3/5 Stars I picked this one up because it was short and in the new books section of the library and I like little Scandinavian books, and this one was an odd and curious little gem of a book. The story here is about a woman living with a man and sort of trying to figure out who she is in the world. She’s closed off emotionally, she reads a lot, she thinks about death a lot, and she makes little […]
Mother, mother
The Scapegoat – Mary Lee Settle This is the fourth book in the Beaulah Quinet, Mary Lee Settle’s history of West Virginia through the lens of conflicts ranging from the ousting of a Puritan partisan in the English Civil War (leading to immigration to America) to the settling and drawing of land parcels in the 18th century to a novel I haven’t read yet in the 1840s to this coal mining dispute in 1912 and finally to more or less contemporary times. Following one family, in […]
“How waste everything looks when ye can’t fix a name to it”
So imagine the movie The VVitch taking place about a 100 years later, and in western Virginia/border of Ohio territory instead. There’s still lots of fear and anxiety but there’s no witch. Not even a little witch. This novel comes from a collection of novels by a novelist most (including me until about a year or so ago) from West Virginis named Mary Lee Settle. One of those novelists who spends her entire career at a university, even wins some awards, but maybe doesn’t have the […]