The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb

by Carol27 Comments
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb This was a good story, although not the story I expected. In 1935, a young school teacher in the remote mountains of Virginia is charged with murdering her father. Because she is beautiful and the story sensational, national reporters are sent to cover the trial, and the young woman's brother seeks exclusive rights to her story, with the money supposedly going to her defense fund. The national reporters don't find the hillbillies living in run down shacks that they expect, so they fabricate them.  Carl Jenkins, a recent college-graduate, is a reporter from Tennessee, who realizes that the star reporters are not actually reporting the truth, more perpetuating myths about Appalachian life. Truth is the main issue here. Reporters shape what they know and see into a story their audience wants. But what is the truth? Is there a truth? The commonwealth's attorney warmed to his topic. "I had one of those reporters ask me...
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Up in the Hills

by Carol11 Comments
Some of the folks up here were smarter than anybody he had met at the college, and they read everything they could find, so that they salted their conversations with phrases from Milton, Homer, and Shakespeare. So why were they content to remain here? He wasn't sure, but if he had to put a name to his hunch, he might have called it shyness or, more precisely, since it was not fear, a disinclination to involve themselves in the machinations of society. (pg. 36, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb, ARC) I've only started this book, but so far I like how it gives the different views on Appalachian people. The out of town press think of the locals as hillbillies, uneducated moonshine drinkers. The local man, who is trying to work his way up in the newspaper business realizes that the people who choose to live in the mountains do it for their own reason, they're not to stupid...
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Cinderella

by Carol5 Comments
"Cinderella" is another of those fairy tales that we all know or at least think we do. It's also a story that's been told in countless countries in countless ways. I read a few versions this week. The one I was most familiar with was written by Charles Perrault around 1697. His story includes the evil stepmother, the fairy godmother, the pumpkin and animals being turned into the coach and servants, the glass slippers. The father is alive, just not present in the story. These fairy tale fathers and their lack of any kind of backbone is astonishing. How he could let his only child, the daughter of his dead wife, be abused in his own household, given the most menial chores, be lower than a servant? I also read a Grimm's version, which is entirely different, not the story I knew. Cinderellas' mother dies and on her deathbed she promises, "Dear child, remain pious and good, and then our dear God will...
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