REVIEW: FALLING LEAVES AND MOUNTAIN ASHES by Brenda George
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Harley, who elopes with Zachary Thomas to the dreaded Claw Mountain. The mountain is inhabited by a wild, violent and lawless clan known as the “Buckos”, who are engaged in a vicious 30-year feud with the neighboring Galtreys. Zachary Thomas Buchanan, Mary’s husband, is the eldest of the sixteen living sons of the clan’s brutal patriarch, Obediah. Obediah, who comes from a wealthy valley family, is a fugitive from the law and a renowned moonshiner.
Despite the fact that Eli is one of the younger Buckos – a ruthless exponent of the knife and the whip – he is the most feared. But nobody, except Zachary Thomas, knows of the dark, terrible secret he harbors within him that changed him from an innocent boy into a monster. A collision course is instantly set between Eli and Mary, bringing much danger to her and others on the mountain. Eli is a gifted pretender and his fortunes change when he enters Skyland, the famed mountain summer resort, and playground to the rich and influential, to sell moonshine. He finds love, the road to riches and a rocky road to redemption.
The fiercely independent mountain people lead tough, frugal lives, bravely facing all the hazards of Nature, but none of them is prepared for the most devastating blow of all to their loved lifestyle …
With undertones of the mystical and the spiritual, this story is set against an authentic background of Blue Ridge mountain life and is a rich weave of humor and heartache, love and violence, courage and brutality, feuds and strong family ties, and is set amongst the raw, unspoiled beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the famed summer mountain resort of Skyland and Washington D.C.”
Obediah himself once knew a life of prosperity and splendor, being a descendant of a wealthy aristocratic family who owned vast tobacco plantations and several distilleries in the Graves Mill area. His refusal to join the Confederate army during the Civil War, and his wild, unsavory lifestyle, had him disowned and banned from his family (who were all killed in the war anyway and their plantations totally destroyed by fires). His deeply-rooted resentment of authority allowed him to ignore the rights and wishes of the wealthy landowner, Devon Ansley, on whose land Obediah defiantly established himself as a squatter. To him, Claw Mountain was his inviolate kingdom and his mode of rule, both in the mountain and off, was fear. He claimed Ansley Devon’s property as his own divine right, after Ansley decided for unknown reasons to abandon it.
”All in all, Obediah had sired an awesome tribe of twenty sons (three having died in infancy and one in childhood). The Buckos, as they became known, soon became greatly feared. Mean-spirited and wild, and from a very young age, they drank 100-proof whiskey produced from their father’s hidden still-site, and roamed the mountains, rocking shacks and cabins and folk with impunity, and using their guns and knives at the least provocation, a fact of which Obediah seemed immensely proud.”
In the media of yesteryear, the Claw Mountain dwellers were depicted as backwards, ignorant and shiftless. They were also caricatured as hillbillies living in squalid conditions. The agenda of the government and private interest group behind it was to vilify them enough so that their final destiny would not be frowned upon by the general public. But then an author such as Brenda George comes along and put the heart back into the people and their mountain and expose these “false claims” against the people. (How false it was is debatable though).
There’s no reason to think that somebody who comes from the mountains can’t succeed. It’s just changing the contours of their expectations, and maybe the geography of their hearts. This story proved it.
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Source: http://bookstomorrow.blogspot.com/2013/09/review-falling-leaves-and-mountain.html
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