Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley : Novellas and Stories

Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley , a follow–up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connected to their land––sometimes through love, sometimes through hate––and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. Retired strip miners find themselves victimized by the industry that supported them; a family breaks down along generation lines over a fracking lease; children transcend addict parents and adult suicide; an urban woman must confront her skepticism about worlds behind this one when she finds bones through a mysterious force she can't name. Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley explores poverty, class, environmental breakdown and social collapse while also affirming the world's sacredness. Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect is both pitch–perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her firsthand knowledge of her rural place and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families may remind one of Alice Munro. Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange as This Weather Has Been centered on mountaintop removal and its effects upon a single coal mining family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing short stories, Pancake returns to her native West Virginia to tell stories of other traditional people. These are folks living much as they have for three hundred years, tried by poverty and ill health but needing the coal companies' upon which the economy is entirely dependent, even as they witness the air and land and water of this beautiful place being imperiled and destroyed. Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect - in both towns and in the countryside -- is both pitch perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her characters are ensnared in the complexities of rural economies where there are no quick fixes to questions surrounding right livelihood even going off to college. With first-hand knowledge of the provincial locale and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families, she might well remind you of Alice Munro. In her intimate depiction of the natural history of rural Appalachia, Me and My Daddy