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Rating: 
Summary: A riveting, uplifting story with the ring of authenticity!
Review: Folks, this is a great book! As a professor of English and the facilitator of a book group for 12 years, I can recommend this book very highly. It is full of wisdom, it is about a North Carolina family just before and after the Civil War, and the characters that you will meet and the warm, down-home wisdom will stay with you. The book also has a cd with author, folklorist, and singer Sheila Kay Adams singing in her wonderful North Carolina accent, playing banjo and dulcimer, and sharing with the world her rich heritage through fiction. You won't regret reading this one!
Rating: 
Summary: Reads like a ballad
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. This novel reads like a ballad of long ago. It had happy times & very sad, tragic times. I will read more of Ms. Adams books.
Rating:
Summary: Better Than Cold Mountain
Review: This first novel is a haunting gem of writer's art. It literally pulsates from the realness of the people it brings to life. "Some people is born at the start of a long hard row to hoe," the feisty heroine, Arty Norton says, "... and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I've ever seen." Growing up together in the shadow of Lonesome Mountain, in North Carolina, two boys are inseparable companions. As they mature, they find themselves at odds when the Civil War rips the fabric of their isolated community and they both fall in love with Mary, a redhead beauty who "smells like strawberries." Like the ballads interspersed throughout the book to express emotions the characters find too intense to speak in words, the novel embodies the passion, violence, betrayal and tragic lyricism typical of mountain tales. The characters speak in a dialect that is music itself--lilting, full of metaphors, an old-fashioned sidewise approach to conversation that makes today's in-your-face directness seem coarse. I'm sorry this book ended. I could have read it forever.
Rating:
Summary: Better Than Cold Mountain
Review: This first novel is a haunting gem of writer's art. It literally pulsates from the realness of the people it brings to life. "Some people is born at the start of a long hard row to hoe," the feisty heroine, Arty Norton says, "... and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I've ever seen." Growing up together in the shadow of Lonesome Mountain, in North Carolina, two boys are inseparable companions. As they mature, they find themselves at odds when the Civil War rips the fabric of their isolated community and they both fall in love with Mary, a redhead beauty who "smells like strawberries." Like the ballads interspersed throughout the book to express emotions the characters find too intense to speak in words, the novel embodies the passion, violence, betrayal and tragic lyricism typical of mountain tales. The characters speak in a dialect that is music itself--lilting, full of metaphors, an old-fashioned sidewise approach to conversation that makes today's in-your-face directness seem coarse. I'm sorry this book ended. I could have read it forever.
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