Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | McCrumb, S. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Captured by the Shawnee in 1799, Katie Wyler braved two hundred miles of wilderness to return to her home in the Tennessee hills. Even today "when the air is crisp and the light is slanted and the birds are still," her spirit is still seen wandering these hills...these hills that are home to mountain wise woman Nora Bonesteel...that become a classroom to city-bred grad student Jeremy Cobb and a haven to prison escapee Hiram Sorley. A superbly written novel of suspense, and a story of all of their mountain journeys and intersecting paths, both literal and figurative.
Author Notes
Sharyn McCrumb was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on February 26, 1948. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech. Her novels include the Elizabeth MacPherson series and the Ballad series. St. Dale won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award and the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Sherwood Anderson Short Story Award, the Perry F. Kendig Award for Achievement in Literary Arts, the Chaffin Award for Southern Literature, and the Plattner Award for Short Story. In 2014, she received the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina's Chowan University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
YAMystery and folklore are skillfully blended in this contemporary Appalachian tale. Driving the plot are ``Harm'' (Hiram) Sorley, an aging prisoner suffering from recent memory loss, who receives a spiritual message to escape from prison and return home to North Carolina; history grad student Jeremy Cobb, who wants to hike the trail used by Katie Wyler in the late 1700s when she escaped from Indians who held her captive; and members of the sheriff's department who search for both of these men. Strong females also figure prominently in this title, not the least of whom is Katie Wyler, dead over 200 years, whose spectral image helps several characters. Assisting Sheriff Arrowwood is his newest deputy, Martha Ayers, who's determined to prove she can rise above the lot of dispatcher. When all these folks converge beside a burning trailer home, more than one mystery is solved. McCrumb's rich use of dialect, accompanied by both physical description of and folklore about the mountains, combine to produce an evocative, haunting story. This novel defies stereotypical mystery elements, offering instead a complete melange of character study, plot, and setting.Pam Spencer, Chapel Square Media Center, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1779, Katie Wyler, 18, was captured by the Shawnee in North Carolina. The story of her escape and arduous journey home through hundreds of miles of Appalachian wilderness is the topic of ethno-historian Jeremy Cobb's thesis-and the thread which runs through the third of McCrumb's ballad novels (after The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter). As Cobb begins to retrace Katie's return journey, 63-year-old convicted murderer Hiram (Harm) Sorley escapes from a nearby prison. Suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, he has no recent memory: old Harm is permanently stuck in the past. Hamelin, Tenn., police dispatcher Martha Ayers uses the opportunity to convince the sheriff to assign her as a deputy. One of her first duties is to calm a young mother who, angry at her inattentive husband, is threatening her baby with a butcher knife. Ayers and the sheriff must also warn Harm's ex-wife Rita that he has escaped. Acting as a kind of narrative conscience is a local deejay, a ``carpetbagger from Connecticut,'' who sees Harm as a folk hero from another era. Deftly building suspense, McCrumb weaves these colorful elements into her satisfying conclusion as she continues to reward her readers' high expectations. Mystery Guild selection; author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The latest in McCrumb's Ballad series (The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, 1992, etc.) takes off from the legendary tale of Katie Wyler. Kidnapped by the Shawnee in 1779, her escape took her hundreds of miles back to her family in Tennessee before ending in tragedy. Now four people are retracing, mostly unconsciously, the steps of her famous escape. Jeremy Cobb, the most deliberate of the four, is a young historian looking for a new angle for his dissertation on Katie and hoping that a few nights under the stars will reveal to him the same visions that second-sighted old Nora Bonesteel has had. At the same time, Sabrina Harkryder, a hillbilly bride locked in combat with her husband's family, is reliving Katie's life in a much more literal, hopeless way. And Hiram Sorley, an aging convict whose Korsakoff's syndrome has trapped his brain in 1968, when he was sentenced to 99 years for murder, has escaped from prison and is making a beeline to the wife he thinks is still 20 years old. Even Martha Ayers, longtime police dispatcher and acting deputy, finds uncomfortable parallels between her own life and Katie's while she's out looking for Hiram. Before all the trails end, there'll be two more homicides, a suicide, a case of maddened arson capped by still another death, and enough sad satisfaction for three novels. By turns funny, probing, elegiac, and as wise about history as McCrumb has ever been: another stellar performance from one of the best. (Mystery Guild main selection; author tour)
Booklist Review
The hills along the border where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina meet are full of walkers in Edgar-winner McCrumb's third Ballad-series story, but just miles from the Appalachian Trail, the wanderers meet each other only rarely. First among them is Katie Wyler, a teenage North Carolina settler kidnapped by Shawnees in 1779; escaping near the Ohio River, Katie plunged back through the wilderness, only to die the day she returned to her neighbors' home. Katie's ghost shares these hills with other troubled souls: a 63-year-old escaped convict, his memory befuddled by Korsakoff's syndrome; the convict's ex-wife and daughter; an isolated, frightened young mountain girl with a brutal husband and a crying baby; East Coast transplants Hank "the Yank" Kretzer, who checks out the convict's 25-year-old crime for his radio talk show (think of Chris on TV's Northern Exposure), and history graduate student Jeremy Cobb, obsessed with his dissertation topic (Katie Wyler), intent on following her centuries-old trail through the hills; and Martha Ayers, striving to move up from dispatcher to deputy on Sheriff Spencer Arrowood's staff while coping with Deputy Joe LeDonne's personal betrayal. As in her other Ballad novels, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1992), McCrumb celebrates her home country, probes the multilayered puzzles of past and present, and meditates on human suffering and the survival instinct with sensitivity and compassion. (Reviewed August 1994)0684195569Mary Carroll
Library Journal Review
A tale of an escaped convict from Edgar Award winner McCrumb. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.