Strange, very. But good.

 
If the Creek Don't Rise

What a strange book. I've never before enjoyed a book with a totally oddball structure--overlapping snippets out of many peoples' lives--and I wouldn't have even tried to read this one if I'd known. But it worked!

On later reflection, I wonder if she might have been setting herself up for a series of sequels. There were a lot of plot threads left hanging, although none seemed to be essential to completing the story. They were just hints and suggestions of story lines to come.

Or maybe not.

It's about a schoolteacher who comes to take over a small one-room schoolhouse in the Appalachian mountains, and her effect on the people she meets there. At least that's what the cover blurb said it was about. It was very little about that at all...or if it was, I missed an awful lot. But it was about people living in the mountains, some people almost sainthood-worthy good and others just through and through rotten. I didn't enjoy reading about the rotten, and sometimes wondered why she bothered putting them in.

And the one most interesting character of all, the semi-recluse who lives near the schoolhouse and does odd, almost magical things to move the plot along...? She's hardly in the story at all. Darn it!