Appalachian Mountain Girl: Coming of Age in Coal Mine Country

By: Rhoda Warren

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Synopsis: Appalachian Mountain Girl is a sensitive and beautifully written autobiographical account of a childhood in the coalmine district of Depression-era Kentucky. With humor and warmth--but without sentimentality--Rhoda Warren recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and family values buttressed and sustained them. As a young girl, Rhoda began to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in True Confessions magazine and the pictures in the Montgomery Ward catalog--which to her seemed like "visions of a fairy world." When Rhoda married and moved to a small town in New York State, it seemed that her dreams of a better life had been realized. Yet scenes of Letcher always "hovered in the back roads of her memory." When she revisited her homeland, this time as a New Yorker, Rhoda found that Letcher was no longer the place of her memories.