by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Four stars – a human story…

Verdict: Buy it! Read it! This is an easy, well-paced read from an excellent storyteller set in a place that will widen your horizons and make you feel. That’s what reading is about, right?

What’s it about? The story revolves around Cowney Sequoyah, a nineteen-year-old young man living on the reservation in Cherokee, North Carolina, with his grandmother Lishie and Uncle Bud. The setting is in the southern Appalachians during the summer of 1942 (WWII). Cowney has a disability and cannot serve in the war, so he is off to Asheville to work in the high class Grove Park Inn and Resort where Axis diplomats and their families are being kept as prisoners of war and guarded by U.S. troops. He feels this summer job will help him to escape the reservation, at least for a time. He strikes up a friendship with a young woman from Cherokee, who is also working at the hotel for the summer. The hotel (and a particular room) becomes his refuge from everything he has faced as a young man on the reservation. Yet the biases and prejudices return as he is accused of abduction and murder of a missing little girl.

The Story (plot and character): The entire story is told in first person through the eyes of Cowney, which makes it easy to to get caught up in his life, his problems, his view of the world, his story, his growth. There are some surprises, but that’s not the intent of this book. It’s written as a coming of age novel from a POV that I don’t possess. It’s a human story that could be told today in our era of struggle to be inclusive versus divisive. The story is also simple, easy to read. I don’t say this as a negative. The prose is about right for me. Too much flowery prose, while beautiful, can get in the way of good storytelling. That does not happen in this book.

What’s good about the book? The storytelling period. And it’s a viewpoint that is of great interest to me. It’s also easy to feel for Cowney as he deals with universal issues we all face (friendship, family, hostility, betrayal, discrimination, etc.). The story is engrossing and completely believable.

I loved the setting. Southern Appalachia brings images of dumb rednecks making moonshine (like the movie Deliverance). Don’t fuss, I was born in Alabama. Yet I’ve never been to Asheville, but I know it’s a beautiful part of the south. I got a good sense of place and the differences between living in Cherokee (which I imagined too as a beautiful place, but mostly poor from an economic standpoint). I also had no idea about keeping Axis enemy families prisoner in a place like the Grove Park Inn. The entire novel could have been at any other time, but putting it in this WWII-era was really a stroke of genius.

The ending. The author knows how to end a story. Hit it out of the park, IMO.

What was not so good? This section will be short. There were a few places/events that I thought would play a larger role in the book (e.g., the waterfall). That marginally got in the way of the flow. And it’s completely possible I missed the meaning. But blah blah blah, this is a really good story, so I’ll stop nitpicking.

Bottom line: If you want a fast-paced mystery or suspense, this is not the book for you. If you want a steamy romance, then no. If you want to see life from the eyes of a young man who faced great odds back in the 1940s and you love a good story, a human story, a storyteller’s story, this is your book.