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Summary
Summary
A West Virginia family struggles amid the booms and busts of the Appalachian coal industry in this "powerful, sure-footed, and haunting" novel with echoes of John Steinbeck ( New York Times Book Review ).
Set in present day West Virginia, this debut novel tells the story of a coal mining family--a couple and their four children--living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their hometown. As the mine turns the mountains "to slag and wastewater," workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters.
Strange as This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more frequently outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows--the only nature they have ever known.
But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.
Author Notes
A native of Romney, West Virginia, Ann Pancake earned a BA in English from West Virginia University, an MA in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. Ann Pancake has lived in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, where she taught English as a Second Language. Pancake currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Seattle.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A hard-living Appalachian family weathers a contemporary coal boom in the debut from West Virginia native Pancake. Soon after their first meeting in the 1980s, college freshman Lace See and 15-year-old local boy James Makepeace Turrell ("Jimmy Make") conceive their first child. Nearly 20 years later, Lace is uneasily settled as a mother to Jimmy's four children as a flurry of strip mining and clear cutting make the mountains she has known since childhood unrecognizable. One summer right after a strip-mining induced flood, things come to a head. Lace's environmental activism ramps up; daughter Bant, working at a local motel, discovers her allegiance to the mountains and her sexuality; each of Lace and Jimmy's three sons (Corey, Jimmy and Dane) is touched in turn by the collapsing economy and environment. Lush descriptions of the landscape are matched with a hurtling stream-of-consciousness narration to great effect: one doubts neither the characters' voices nor their places in a very complex poverty. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With her beloved West Virginia hollows and valleys under constant onslaught by a savage coal-mining industry whose raping of the land threatens her home with devastating floods, Lace Ricker finds herself battling callous forces both without and within her own family. As thunderous blasts weaken their home's foundation and poisoned wastewater infiltrates their well, Lace and her daughter, Bant, secretly become more determined to find a way to stop the mines, while Lace's husband pragmatically refuses to fight the union bosses, and her sons tentatively, then calamitously, accept the challenges and adventure of life lived in the shadow of imminent danger. By tracing the devastating impact of coal mining through the eyes of Lace and her four children, Pancake's powerful debut novel evinces a poetic pathos and authentic respect for the land and the people who love it. To comprehend the egregious and tragic environmental damage mountaintop-removal coal mining has wrought on the once pristine vistas of Appalachia, one should read any one of many excellent exposés. To understand the human toll such destruction exacts, one must turn to fiction, for novels such as Pancake's reflect deeper, timeless truths.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANN PANCAKE'S fine, ambitious first novel is about something simple: what it's like to live below a mountaintop-removal strip mine. As one family negotiates the Vesuvian landscape of their wrecked hollow, its natural defenses against flooding uprooted and trashed, readers may think of the aftermath of Katrina, another man-made disaster. But until the book dips into explicit activism, this tragedy seems less the work of greedy businessmen than of a terrible old god. The most powerful passages in "Strange as This Weather Has Been" depict the lives of children in West Virginia whose only playground seems to be desolation. In an abandoned precursor to "The Mysterious Stranger," Mark Twain sent Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on a visit to hell. Pancake's 10-year-old Corey is as bright and conniving as Tom Sawyer, but his hell is no vacation spot. He lives there full time. Corey teases his little brother with an apparition called "the monkey," an unidentified drowned thing in one of his many secret places. It's "mostly just an open eye too big for the body, and then a kind of what must be a snout, but most of that turned away and part buried in mud." The image of the monkey haunts the book, as alien and full of warning as the Martian skulls rolled around like snowballs by Ray Bradbury's unthinking colonial boys. Corey's world is full of toxic but irresistible junk that is washed down from deluged dumping grounds; the woods are turned into a bad boy's Wonderland. Some will be reminded of John Boorman's film "Hope and Glory," in which children during the London bombings of World War II played house in the fresh ruins. Pancake writes: "If you can unfocus your eyes right - and Corey can - wading the creek is like walking the aisle of a Wal-Mart made for Corey, with all the price tags saying free." Corey's "unfocusing" is really a kind of wide-open perception - generously shared with the reader - in which the senses flood together and words can hardly keep up. Elsewhere, Pancake's various narrators share noticeable and sometimes distracting linguistic habits, like an ambivalence about the suffix "-ness." One character worries about "the hoarse of my breath." A sound carries "a pleasure and a sad." A stare isn't blank - it has "this blank to it." "I could feel not only the hot wet, but also the nervous off him." And so on. Pancake is well aware of these quirks; she has one character reflect on the deadness of standard English words that "you must use like coins, shiny and rigid. The value of each one already fixed before you get hold of it." In the Corey sections, the stylistic choices don't enter your mind. You are swept along in the escalating peril to his tough, blind innocence. Lace, Corey's mother and the novel's conscience, talks about the way men manage to "stay babified" their entire lives, but the truth is that every character we meet, man or woman, has an endangered child inside. Dane, the most sensitive of the book's many children (he is described, in the space of two sentences, as having both a "soft" and a "softness"), is given what might serve as the book's epigraph: "I'm only 12 years old. And I'm going to see the End of the World." Pancake's aim is that high. Her horrors are biblical, her compassion towering. Her acknowledgments direct the reader to Web sites "to find out more about mountaintop-removal mining." But aside from a few slips into frank didacticism, Pancake is true to the world she depicts, where any idea of deliverance is muted to the point of suffocation. Lace is a strong, smart but defeated woman. The Bush administration's recent push for looser restrictions on mountaintop removal would come as no surprise to her. Lace's battle with the mining company blurs into a kind of existential endurance: "The best way to fight them is to refuse to leave. Stay in their way - that's the only language they can hear. ... Listen here, it says. We exist" Another character, who has escaped the hollow, still carries the mark of that stubborn and inconvenient existence: "In Baltimore or Detroit or Cincinnati or Cleveland or whatever city, it's not just a matter of keeping down the dirt. ... It is a matter of you yourself being perceived as dirt." Pancake - she is a distant relative of the short-story writer Breece D'J Pancake - makes her point in "Strange as This Weather Has Been" in a powerful, sure-footed and haunting way: People aren't dirt. But they know when they're being treated like dirt, whether in the Lower Ninth Ward or the hills of West Virginia. A child's world is full of toxic junk washed down from deluged dumping grounds. Jack Pendarvis's most recent book is the story collection "Your Body Is Changing." He is the visiting writer in residence at the University of Mississippi.
Kirkus Review
A Pushcart Prize-winner offers a searing indictment of the coal industry in this memorable debut novel. A native of West Virginia, Pancake used interviews and real events to shape the fictional story of Lace, Jimmy Make and their four children. Lace first met Jimmy when he was 15 and she was old enough to know better, a college freshman at home for the weekend. The two begin messing around and soon Lace is pregnant, drops out of college and moves back home to the kind of life she thought she had escaped. When her daughter Bant is born, Lace rediscovers the mountain and feels a belonging to the land of her ancestors. Four years later, Lace and Jimmy marry and have son Dane, and then Corey and finally little Tommy. They fall into poverty, mainly due to the new kind of strip mining now used in West Virginia. Well-paid union miners are gone and instead scab laborers work at what's called mountaintop removal--an environmentally devastating method of coal extraction that leaves the landscape utterly barren and the people who live there in danger of both flooding and chemical poisoning. Lace becomes involved in a grassroots movement to save the area from further damage, but nobody wants to listen to poor folk from the hills, and so the family teeters on the verge of destruction. Lace works at Dairy Queen, Jimmy watches TV all day and 15-year-old Bant has a job painting the scab boarding house (where she begins a flirtation with a worker). Dane, meanwhile, lives in terror that the next flood (nothing to do with us, says the coal company) will kill them all, while Corey and Tommy live in the smaller world of childhood that can be just as treacherous as the hollowed-out mountain looming above their house. Pancake, incorporating the cadence of the region, beautifully balances the tragedy of this family in decline with the inevitable destruction of their homeland. The best kind of reportage fiction: evocative and meaningful. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Based on interviews pertaining to actual events, this stirring debut novel centers on one family in a West Virginia coal mining town, the senseless destruction of their land by strip mining, and the cover-up of the illegal dumping of hazardous waste. College dropout Lace marries Jimmy Make, who eventually goes to work in the mines. They have four children whom they struggle to support after Jimmy is injured in a mining accident. After a flash flood threatens her family and in the end destroys homes and kills some of her neighbors, Lace becomes politically active and demonstrates against the coal industry. Having learned from her mother how to live off the land, she discovers to her dismay that their land is now contaminated; the once viable natural surroundings of her childhood have become a hazardous setting that eventually kills one of her children, wrecks her family, and squeezes the spirit out of an entire culture. Through the simple eyes of Lace and her endearing children, this skillfully written book presents critical moral and economic concerns. Championing the protection of our environment, it will shake up readers to action and make them aware that "what we're doing to this land is not only murder-it is suicide." Essential reading.-David A. Berona, Plymouth State Univ., NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
