Appalachian Mountain Girl : Coming of Age in Coal Mine Country

Appalachian Mountain Girl is a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical account of a childhood in the coalmine district of Depression-era Kentucky. With humor and warmth{u2014}but without sentimentality{u2014}Rhoda Warren recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and family values buttressed and sustained them. As a young girl, Rhoda began to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog{u2014}which to her seemed like ?visions of a fairy world.? When Rhoda married and moved to a small town in New York State, it seemed that her dreams of a better life had been realized. Yet scenes of Letcher always ?hovered in the back roads of her memory.? When she revisited her homeland, this time as a New Yorker, Rhoda found that Letcher was no longer the place of her memories One woman's "affecting and well-written" memoir of growing up with twelve siblings in rural Kentucky, and returning as an adult ( Kirkus Reviews ). Appalachian Mountain Girl is a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical account of a childhood in the coalmine district of Depression-era Kentucky. With humor and warmth—but without sentimentality—Rhoda Warren recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and family values buttressed and sustained them. As a young girl, Rhoda began to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog—which to her seemed like visions of a fairy world. Much later, after poverty drove her family to Wyoming and then Rhoda married and moved to a small town in New York State, it seemed that her dreams of a better life had finally been realized. Yet scenes of Letcher always hovered in the back roads of her memory. When she revisited her homeland, this time as a New Yorker, Rhoda found that Letcher was no longer the place she recalled—and in this vivid memoir, she contemplates the relationship between our past and our present and the ways that our childhood stays with us forever.

This is a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical account of a childhood in the coal mine district of Kentucky during the depression. It is full of color, and it details characters of 60 years ago that we can recognise today. It is the author's first book, published when she is 76 years old. From the Author

Booknews

From her warm but realistic memories of Letcher, KY, "the prettiest place in the world" where her father died of black lung disease, emanate 15 chapters related to "Coming of Age in Coal Mine Country" (as the cover's subtitle reads) by a New York transplant. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

The autobiography of Rhoda Bailey Warren, who grew up near the coal mines of Corbin Glow, Kentucky, where her father was a miner. Warren's family later moved to Letcher, Kentucky, and Warren herself eventually moved to New York State and married