I don’t even remember the Florida part! I should mention that my husband moved here from Florida. Not enough to think about reading it again, but it was time well-spent. I wasn’t riveted to the page, but I did enjoy it. A little brutally honest, perhaps, but there you go.īut overall, this was an interesting book.

They were sort of caricatures, and we don’t really think they’re all like that, but we do feel like some newcomers think us locals are barbarians who should just leave and let them enjoy their cliffside homes. I’ll be a little devilish here and say that I also enjoyed the way McCrumb wrote about our transplants from Florida.

He only had a few chapters, but I felt like they could have been cut out completely without really hurting the story. In fact, I’m not entirely sure why his parts were even included. There was one other narrator in the book, but he had a very minor role. Lee Smith does a much better job with our Appalachian dialect. The author gave it a good try, but she didn’t quite get the accent and the language right. The only negative I have to say about it is that Malinda’s voice didn’t ring entirely true. The voices of the different narrators were done very well. I’d heard somewhere that we were exceptionally torn apart during that conflict because we weren’t wealthy landowners and so had no clear-cut reason to join either side. I enjoyed reading about my region’s role in the Civil War. Then there’s Rattler, a modern day man with a touch of the second sight who realizes that the Civil War re-enactors of the mountains are calling up uneasy spirits who are best left alone. Next is Malinda Blalock, a tough mountain woman who follows her husband to war and beyond.

We follow him from his days as a hotel porter fresh off the farm until his rise to governor. First is Zebulon Vance, the real life Civil War governor of North Carolina. This is a story told from many points of view.

Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb