Looking Back - Gap Creek

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals. 

Gap Creek by Robert Morgan

Fiction

2000 Touchstone (originally published in 1999)

Read in March 2000

Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.

But Julie and Hank's new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it's hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

A native of the North Carolina mountains, Robert Morgan was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors. An accomplished novelist and poet, he has won the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize. His short stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and New Stories from the South, and his novel The Truest Pleasure was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

My Original Thoughts (2000):

Reminds me a little bit of A Sweetness to the Soul by Jane Kirkpatrick. Too much detail. States the obvious too often. Not boring, but flat. Repetitious sentences. Disappointing.

My Current Thoughts:

Another novel that was probably recommended by one of my online book groups. I'm surprised I didn't liken it to Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, which I also found tedious and disappointing.