Description
"A marvelous debut...has everything a big, thick novel should have, and I hated to put it down." - John Grisham "A page-turner." - New York Times Book Review For readers of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, this is a dramatic and deeply moving novel about an act of violence in a small Appalachian town and the repercussions that will forever change a young man's view of human cruelty and compassion. After seeing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, fourteen-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this town of Medgar, Kentucky, a peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The town is beset by a massive mountaintop removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the "company" and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. But when Buzzy witnesses a brutal hate crime, a sequence is set in play that will test Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains. *Includes Reading Group Guide*
About the Author
I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth.When I was about Kevin’s age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site—creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of loss at the destruction of our woods—one we couldn’t quite understand or articulate, but it hung over us that summer like a fogged-in field.By the time I went off to college, the countryside of my youth was solidly suburban. It was in college that I first fell in love with Appalachia. Initially for her music—the spinning lilt of a fiddle reel; the compact fury of a mandolin run; the plaintive harmonies—then, for her beauty, as I came to know the region in my twenties with little but a backpack and a camp stove.About that time, I met a good friend’s mother for the first time—she was an incredibly beautiful woman who seemed to carry with her a deep-set sadness. I asked my friend about it and he told me the story of how his three-year-old brother died in the most horrific accident at home you could possible imagine. I carried the story of this child’s death with me for many years and knew that I had to write a novel about its effect on a family. I also knew that Appalachia, a region I’d come to loved so well, would be a perfect setting for this nascent coming-of-age novel.But as the years unspooled—I graduated from college, began a career, moved to London, got married, had kids—I discovered innumerable reasons not to write. In fact, I perfected the art of excuse-making. On and on, month after month, year-to-year.And as I stared down forty, I realized that this great bright dream of being a novelist was in danger of becoming my single biggest regret. I began writing The Secret Wisdom of the Earth the very next day, with the awful death of my friend’s young brother as the tragedy that sets the story in motion.It was slow-going, to be sure—I’d rise at 5:00 a.m. each morning, write in the quiet hours before work, then revise and edit in the evenings after putting my boys to bed. But it was in this routine of early rising and evening editing that the main characters, Kevin, Buzzy, Pops, Tilroy and Paul, began to take shape.I completed about half of the novel in London—fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers—but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything together turned out to be nub ends. I moved back to the States and immediately went down to eastern Kentucky in hopes of breaking this narrative logjam. It was on this trip that I saw my first Mountaintop Removal operation.The horrific gray scar of that mine brought back the sense of sickening loss I’d had at fourteen when the pristine woods I’d grown up in were cut down, hauled away and replaced with tract housing. I knew then, looking out over this massive, denuded landscape in Kentucky, that the eradication of these proud ancient mountains was a fitting allegory for a loss that all of the main characters suffer. Once I connected these themes, the rest of the story began to bubble forth.My trips to Kentucky, talking with folks and listening to their stories, showed me that the apologue of Mountaintop Removal is a complicated one—one that can’t be reduced to simply good vs. evil or rich vs. poor. I tried to portray this hard-bought paradox and lay it alongside Kevin’s story in a compelling way.
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