Synopsis
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as aman" they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop.
People depend on her. They need her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries Hank and moves down into the valley where fire and visions visit themselves on her and where con men and drunks come calling.
Julie and Hank discover that the modern world is complex, grinding ever on without pause or concern for their hard work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay.
With Julie, Robert Morgan has brought to life one of the most memorable women in modern American literature with the same skill that led the Boston Book Review to say that he writes "with an authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century."
In this novel, Morgan returns to the vivid world of the Appalachian high country to follow Julie and Hank in their new life on Gap Creek and their efforts to make sense of the world in the last years of the nineteenth century. Scratching out a life for themselves, always at risk of losing it all, Julie and Hank don't know what to fear most--the floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters who insinuate themselves into their new lives.
Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of marriage make this a powerful follow-up to Morgan's acclaimed novel, The Truest Pleasure.
David Harsanyi
Morgan's Gap Creek is an Appalachian town on the border of the Carolinas. In this world, Mother Nature rules and misfortune is an accepted fact of everyday life. With delicate, detail-rich prose, Morgan relates the story of young Julie Harmon and her husband Hank's first year of marriage. Their brutal life-filled with death, oppressive winters, fire, flood and about every other calamity a writer could conjure up-tests their love, not to mention their physical and emotional endurance.
Morgan's talent for gracefully illustrating the practical details of rural life is astonishing. Gap Creek's beauty is found in its depiction of the dazzling Appalachian landscape and its people. Yet with all its lush, rustic imagery, investing emotionally in Gap Creek is quite a chore. The inhabitants fall so quickly from one tragedy into the next that the reader develops an immunity to their misfortune. Nonetheless, Morgan succeeds in painting a heartfelt picture of southern life.