Free Download Books Strange as This Weather Has Been Online

Be Specific About Books Toward Strange as This Weather Has Been

Original Title:	Strange As This Weather Has Been
ISBN:	159376166X (ISBN13: 9781593761660)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	West Virginia(United States)
Literary Awards:	Orion Book Award Nominee (2008), Weatherford Award for Fiction and Poetry (2007)

Strange as This Weather Has Been

Ann Pancake

Paperback | Pages: 357 pages

Rating: 3.83 | 1053 Users | 211 Reviews

Itemize Appertaining To Books Strange as This Weather Has Been

Title	:	Strange as This Weather Has Been
Author	:	Ann Pancake
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 357 pages
Published	:	September 28th 2007 by Counterpoint (first published September 10th 2007)
Categories	:	Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. American. Southern. Environment

Explanation In Pursuance Of Books Strange as This Weather Has Been

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake’s debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family— a couple and their four children— living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters.

Strange As This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a “scab” motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows— the only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.

Rating Appertaining To Books Strange as This Weather Has Been

Ratings: 3.83 From 1053 Users | 211 Reviews

Write Up Appertaining To Books Strange as This Weather Has Been

Between this novel and Ron Rash's Serena, I've learned a lot--a heartbreaking lot--about Appalachia. In Pancake's novel, the link between environmental and soul devastations becomes clear. It's a novel about generations living in a hollow in West Virginia, and the loss of land and in some ways, the connection to their land. It's told through multiple narrators, and while the technique is important in terms of thinking about who stays and who goes, I found it difficult to read some of the

This was a hard book to read! First, the sadness of what families in the coal-mining mountains of West Virginia have to endure, is just plain depressing. Secondly, reading the back-woods dialect was hard to understand. Half the time I was reading, I was thinking to myself...what the heck is this about? The beauty of reading, is forming the picture in your mind, a vision of what the author is describing. I couldn't grasp that in this book. Witnessing what started as "hot wet" between Lace and

Incredibly good. Difficult, at first, like a Faulkner book, but you get the sense of most of the characters by about halfway in. Pancake writes well in the epic psychological scale of people directly confronting just what mountaintop removal means.

A successful protest novel for me (Pancake got me looking up resistance groups working against mountain-top removal); a lot of yearning in this book; I could feel it consistently; felt the homesickness running through it; had to play Townes Van Zandt on repeat after finishing. As a West Virginian, I was grateful for the painful accounts Pancake includes (re-imagined from interviews) about the Buffalo Creek mining disaster, in the 70s, I think. I never realized the extent of the horror and,

Ann Pancake's story of a young girl in West Virginia coal country who gets pregnant, drops out of college and ends up in a life that, from the outside, might look like a failure. I say from the outside because the girl, Lace, has such a relationship with nature stronger, it seems, than with her husband or children or any person that her return to "her land" and her fight to stay there in the face of strip mining and the death of one of her boys almost feels like a victory.As someone from that

Sing along with me: "Almost Heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River." This book is about those "Country Roads" of West Virginia (or any other part of "Coal Country" in the Southern Appalachian Mountain Chain I would think) and where they take you......just not in the way John Denver intended when you're humming along. Certainly the beauty of the places in that tune are on display in this book, as you follow salt of the earth "Mountain Mommas" through the woods, digging

This novel gave me a powerful understanding of growing up poor in the mountains of West Virginia. It concerns a community that is being dominated by a large company tearing apart the surrounding mountains while strip mining for coal. In a story that has become almost too familiar today, residents must choose between leaving, working for the company, or standing up to them in an effort to protect the environment. The author uses such an abundance of metaphors and colorful expressions that the