Lick Creek: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Brad Kessler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2001

Set in the remote mining country of West Virginia in the late twenties, "Lick Creek" is the compelling story of a fiery young woman, Emily Jenkins, and what happens when progress -- and tragedy -- comes to her family's farm. Brad Kessler has a generous and keen eye for natural landscape and its power in human life. In his profound, dramatic first novel, he explores the complex intersections of faith, tradition, and innovation.

After the coal mine deaths of her father, brother, and the first man she loved, Emily struggles to support herself and her mother. When construction begins on the power lines, she blames the intruders for everything that has gone awry -- for her mother's increasing withdrawal from life and for lives already lost. Then, an electrical worker is struck by lightning. Brought to their farmhouse unconscious and badly injured, Joseph is taken in by Emily's mother, and Emily is seduced by the mystery of his past, his immigration from Russia, his own mother's deportations, and the world of immigrants forced to flee persecution in their homelands.

Moving from romance to high drama, Kessler illuminates the role of electricity in the transformation of rural life and the particular electricity between two vastly different people whose worlds and passions collide.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This dramatic first novel by a magazine journalist and seasoned author of children's books is set in the 1920s in the mining country of West Virginia, where Emily Jenkins, a fiery tomboy in her late teens, lives with her family on a small farm. One June day, her clairvoyant mother, Ada, clutches Emily's arm with cold fingers just before they hear "a muffled boom [that] sounded like a mattress falling in a meadow." The explosion in the coal mine takes the lives of her father, her brother and her first love. In their struggle to get by on their own, Emily and her mother accept $30 from the Appalachian Light and Power Company for permission to build high-tension towers on their farm. Meanwhile, Emily sells mushrooms, blackberries and goat cheese to a hotel in White Sulphur, a short train ride away. There she meets a supervisor of the power company named Daniels, who plies her with drink and seduces her. She vows revenge. When the towers begin to go up, one of the linemen, Joseph Gershon, is severely injured in a rainstorm and is taken in and nursed by Ada. Emily, almost against her will, learns about his unhappy history as a Jewish ‚migr‚ from Russia and about his passion for electrical work. The two fall in love, and the author evokes a powerful, moving romance that is sorely tested when Emily's demand for vengeance leads to a fracas that compels the couple to flee. The story's abrupt resolution may disappoint, but Kessler's lyrical prose is seductive, and so is his compassionate portrayal of the hillbilly characters whose lives become a working-class American tragedy. (Mar.)Forecast: Kessler's vivid account should interest readers of Denise Giardina and Mary Lee Settle, who have written eloquently about coal miners' lives, and of Lee Smith, whose fiction is set in Appalachia. If booksellers handsell to fans of those writers, sales will increase; and it's worth noting that David Baldacci's current bestseller, Wish You Well, also deals with the lives of Southern coal miners.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In the 1920s, coal production is at its peak in West Virginia and an integral part of the economy in Lick Creek, the hometown of Emily Jenkins. Emily is a foreteller of nature who can easily predict what weather the winds will bring, but she could never foresee that her father, brother, and first love would be killed in the depths of a coal mine. Bitterness causes Emily's brassy personality to become volatile; and when the electric company begins work on new power lines across the Jenkins' property, she finds the linemen to be excellent targets for her anger. When lineman Joseph Gershon meets with an accident during a storm and is brought to Emily's home for immediate shelter, a romance ensues. Emily, whose first love worked the insides of the earth, finds herself in love with a man who dangles from towers in the sky. Electricity becomes the conduit for love, loss, and revenge in Kessler's enthralling first novel about a tenacious girl and her quest to rectify transgressions against her. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (March 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743201604
• ISBN-13: 978-0743201605
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,013,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brad Kessler's novel Birds in Fall won the 2006 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the top ten books of the year. He is the author of another novel, Lick Creek, and his non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Bomb. Kessler is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He lives with his wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, in Vermont, where they raise a small herd of dairy goats and produce cheese.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lick Creek, June 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Lick Creek: A Novel (Hardcover)

How do you smell? might be a subtitle for this poetically tactile first novel by the grandson of a main character, not a man personally related to the wonderfully real and tragically human Appalachian maid Emily Jenkins, whose story this is. Her short life moves from one great loss to another, but she endures and does not exhibit, rather embodies, the fierce loyalty and spiritual beauty so much a part of her people. Like her West Virginia homeland Emily is partly wild, knowing how to survive and what is right, the laws of civilization notwithstanding. That civilization and its profit motive violate her family, her home, and her body, urging her to a vengeance that becomes her undoing. Vindicated from the grave, she speaks using Kessler as her vessel. Deeply symbolic and true to the Appalachian manner of speech and humor, Lick Creek is, at last, the great American novel.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars richly imagined, compelling story, March 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Lick Creek: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lick Creek is the best book I've read in a long time. The author has created a fully drawn world, where sights, sounds, smells and feelings are beautifully evoked. The characters are absolutely real, vividly portrayed, and the reader can't help but be drawn in. I was delighted all the way through this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liked this book immensely!!, August 29, 2001

By 

Roy S. (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lick Creek: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was delighted by the language, the story, the characters, especially Emily, the female lead. I liked the atmosphere and the beautiful descriptions of the mountains. I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about good writing and a good story. Once I got passed the first 50 pages, I couldn't put it down.