When my mother first handed me this book, weathered from when she'd first read it, and said "it's one of those Appalachian stories, I think you'll like it" I did not imagine it would make me cry three times and become possibly my favorite book I've ever read. And I appreciated the fact that Giardina (who is an Episcopal lay preacher) presents the role of Christianity in her character's lives and community in a basically favorable light. The reader comes to care about the characters, and their situations and sufferings are often depicted very movingly. It's a book that will, and should, make you angry and ready to stand up for justice -it doesn't tell you concretely how to do that, but that isn't a novelist's responsibility. However, there is a lot of thought-provoking social realism in this book -it provides a real eye-opener to the way miners in Appalachia's coal industry were (and still are) exploited and victimized by wealthy and powerful interests who can defy every consideration of legality and morality and get away with it. Also, if Tom considered his duty of priestly celibacy important enough to prevent him from marrying Jackie, how psychologically probable is it that he would deem it permissible to fornicate with her as long as he only did it once? (From a Protestant perspective, the contradictions in this situation constitute a powerful demonstration of the folly of the whole idea of priestly celibacy -though that wasn't necessarily the author's intention.) It had, for me, several problematic features: there is an excessive amount of bad language, including a number of uses of the f-word, which is not justified by considerations of realism (arguably, some disadvantaged people talk this way -but do Catholic seminary students?) the explicit scenes of illicit sex and drug abuse, though few, were off-putting and my tastes don't basically run to pessimistic, tragic works, which this one ultimately is.
I didn't rate this book as highly as my Goodreads friend Lynne did. 1, 2015: I edited this review just now, principally to incorporate spoiler tags (which didn't exist when I originally did the review) in one place.
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