“LIGHT TO THE HILLS” by Bonnie Blaylock (Lake Union Publishing, 271 pages, $15).
In “Light to the Hills,” the lovely debut novel from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, resident Bonnie Blaylock, the time is 1936 and the place is the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. Twenty-one-year-old Amanda Rye has been hired as a rider for the Packhorse Library Program, a Works Progress Administration project designed to bring books and other printed materials to isolated mountain residents. When Amanda adds the MacInteer family to her regular route, she finds herself drawn to the mother, Rai, and her five children, especially precocious 12-year-old Sass and her big brother, 19-year-old Finn, who works in the coal mines with his father.
At first resistant to anything they perceive as charity, the MacInteers soon warm up to Amanda and welcome her into their home. Since her husband’s funeral, Amanda has been estranged from her own family, and she enjoys spending time with the MacInteers, eating a meal, reading to the children and talking with Rai. Eventually she begins to teach Sass and her siblings to read. “What had started as a chance to earn a wage had grown into something of a mission in Amanda’s mind,” Blaylock writes, “almost a sacred duty as she witnessed week by week the small joys and discoveries the worn books, magazines and scrapbooks brought to the cabins she reached.”
Blaylock’s haunting descriptive passages evoke the mountains’ bright pleasures — the flora and fauna, the beautiful vistas, the peace of a simple life — as well as their dark dangers and sorrows, including the tortured lives of those forced to dig coal to survive:
“In the coal mines, chipped and hacked and blown apart until their passages reach down into the heart of the mountains, the darkness is a cruel, live thing. At first it sidles up like a sly cat, and no matter how sternly you cast it off, it brushes around your legs and shoulders. Past a certain depth, it starts to mean business. It closes around a person like climbing inside a grave hole. That kind of dark has no sweet smells, no breezes. The reliable sun never reaches its rays into the hidey-holes and corners under all that rock.”